Tomorrow's Return, part of the Electric Dub Station series, is a project by Antonio José Guzmán (Panama, 1971) and Iva Jankovic (Serbia, 1979) that weaves a narrative of migration, resistance, and futurism through textiles and sound. Their work delves into the transatlantic connections of indigo, a pigment laden with history that spans centuries of colonialism, trade, and diaspora. In the duo's practice, indigo is a living archive, a vestige of ancestral memories, vibrations that resonate in the music and cultures of the Americas.
Guzmán and Jankovic investigate how the sonic structures and songs that enslaved Africans sang while working in the production of indigo, sugar, coffee, and cotton on plantations continue to reverberate in Afro-Caribbean musical genres such as Jamaican dub. In her work, these rhythms manifest as visual and structural echoes, reflecting how diasporic sounds and colonial struggles continue to resonate in the present.
The textiles, created in collaboration with Sufiyan Khatri’s workshop in Gujarat, India, carry multiple temporalities and geographies. They function as palimpsests where Mesoamerican indigenous patterns, Adinkra symbols, and echoes of Afrofuturism intertwine. The hand-printed Ajrak textiles rewrite the sacred narratives of these materials, revealing the imprint of colonial trade and the global economy. At this intersection of lines and pigments, history is reconfigured as a field of forces where resistance, memory, and creation converge.