Fictional Futures: speculating to live and die well, with and in other worlds
A recent hypothesis has been captivating my thoughts: that our collective conception of the future is and will be as poor and unfulfilling as our failure to fabricate more-than-human stories. Although I still lack the bibliographic sources to support this statement from a comparative and scientific standpoint (is it even possible to understand past perceptions of the future?; is there any tangible correspondence between ancient fictions and the state of the world today?), to me it is abundantly clear that the most daring and revolutionary narratives currently emerging – in the arts, philosophy or science studies – are those that rave about the anthropocentric notion of a sad and lonely ‘we’.
At a time when we are debating the urgency of historical reparations, when Europe still has open wounds from its bellicose, colonial and slavocratic past-Present, I am also reflecting on the ethical challenges posed by the extinct worlds of other species. How to restore so many lost relationships? How to rebuild the knots untied to discover that we are equally responsible for the past and the future? How to ensure the rights of yesterday and tomorrow?
The answer is not simple or unique; but I believe we need to regenerate and knit together stories. Multiple and plural stories, emerged in thought, materialised in bodies and which find their way into the economy. This is not to say peremptorily that we lack imagination. There is already enough speculation (real estate, financial, factual). Perhaps we lack the exercise of imagining-with: with other agents, with other senses, with other cosmologies, with other questions. Fictional Futures – which adds an “s” to “future” like someone who does not ignore the + in LGBTQIA+ – has made this effort look easy. At Rua das Gaivotas 6, we open a black curtain and suddenly we are in a uchronia with new becomings. Three venues with three installations, activated daily by a distinct performance between March 23 and 25.
The artistic solutions are simple and versatile. At the entrance, a central bed has the projected image of Nina Botkay surrounding Meiga, her dog, and two small devices display videos from human and animal perspectives. In the pink room, a microscopic camera invites the visitor to see themselves in an unusual and strange proportion. In the bright blue main room, we see only a beam of light penetrating glass and water to craft images that are simultaneously mechanical and organic. A lot can be achieved with little.
In ੯∙̀͡ᐡ\’, Maria Ventura, Lui L’Abbate and Nina Botkay foster an affective look at the intimate relationship between humans and dogs. Facing this project inspired by Donna Haraway – whose feminist and ecological thinking was marked by her long friendship with the Australian shepherd Cayenne Pepper – we observe, with tenderness and curiosity, the spontaneous game that moves artist and dog, the caresses exchanged between them and the noisy surprises arising in a non-verbal communication. Initially I raise some major questions: what stories can the animals tell us? What processes do we have to do and sustain to listen to them? Then I realise that I am in a trap. In this prototype of a future interspecies conception, not all non-human beings fit. Not all animals fit, nor all dogs. Only two names do: Nina and Meiga. It takes courage to recognise the specificity of each set of specific relationships – as an academic, a theorist, a writer or simply a human with a bad habit of thinking more than I should, it is urgent to remember that things do not exist in the world to fit our conceptual constructions. In a future time, as in a fictional tale, perhaps philosophy will be less generalist and embrace the point of view of touch and speech, but no less striking. The question of the future depends on scale: “when the splitting of an atom or, more precisely, of its tiny nucleus […] destroys cities and reconstructs the global geopolitical field, how can an ontological commitment to the line in the sand that delimits ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ continue to influence our political conceptions?” [1].
This tension also lies in the installation and performance proposal dust from the stars, a multidisciplinary collaboration between AURORA, Catarina Miranda and Internet Jane. In this timeless space, an optical device wanders with consent between our rugosities, interruptions, continuities and intensities, opening a bizarre reality. No sex, gender, birth certificate or Instagram bio can hide the truth of our arbitrary identity definitions: we are a great heap of fabrics, dust and textures, distinct from our clothes or other inanimate objects only because of a simple difference in pattern and colour. We have never been modern or human. The question of the future is matter. Free to piece together a new and deviant tactile portrait of ourselves – a slightly repulsive, seductive one – we may become aliens, neighbours in the same cyborg universe as AURORA. Remembering the soft voice, piercing screams and radical presence, I envision another future where our prolific images and surface concerns – from digital to skin, from electronic to Earth extraction – embrace the profound denaturalisation of all that has place, mass and volume.
But the world appears to be increasingly filled with elements without place, mass or volume. Therefore, the future fictionalized by Inês Brites, Gonçalo Guiomar and Natacha Campos has nothing solid – it is pure light, reflection, projection, number. In this uchronia, there is no silence; we always hear the perpetual humming of the machines. The body, about to dematerialize and live only as an algorithm, finds reason to ritualize itself. In the performance EXSVLTET: o único tempo que posso habitar infinitamente é a morte, Rua das Gaivotas 6 is transformed into a “post-civilizational” sanctuary. A chant-less mass celebrates the alleged last breath of a flesh that still moves, desires, recoils, experiments. The question of the future is also a question of mourning. What ceremonies should be born to elaborate other deaths and outcomes?
These are questions that call for action: as one of the great masters and sci-fi lovers, Ursula K. Le Guin, beautifully writes, “ethics are born in the timeless soil of Fantasy, where ideologies wither on the vine” [2]. There are – and there must be – futures beyond the heralded future. And, if this is already possible in the imagination, there is nothing to prevent it from being possible in reality.
Fictional Futures takes us suddenly out of the present on March 23, 24 and 25, at Rua das Gaivotas 6.
[1] Barad, Karen (2017). “No small matter: mushroom clouds, ecologies of nothingness, and strange topologies of spacetimemattering”. In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, p. 108.
[2] Le Guin, Ursula K. (1974). “European SF: Rottensteiner’s Anthology, the Strugatskys, and Lem”. In Science Fiction Studies 1, no. 3, p. 184.