Seminar Enacting haunted futures, 10 May 2022 

Click to see Program for the day

The seminar sheds light on how artistic representations, performance arts practices and citizen-based activism imagine and enact futures in times of threats, crisis and trauma in different socio-political contexts: in South Africa, Chile, US, and Europe.

Fundamentally, we ask what role art and civic-artistic initiatives play in opening futures that are not already prognostically predicted in hierarchical power-geometries of neoliberal thinking, technological fetichism and populist-authoritarian nostalgia for past potency. These futures are perhaps affectively mobilizing because they challenge standard temporalities of modern Western epistemology, present new ways of being together and shaping resonant social relations with the world and employ tactile means of communication and engagement that make the future sensuously appealing.

The four talks will take us to afro-futuristic and environmentally just futures, to civic-artistic joyful repertoires of action, to digital virtual creations of spatial justice movements, to the radical democratic art of assembly creating new bonds of response and agency in the collective production of different futures. 

Speakers: 

Prof. Julia Leyda, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim: Black Antroposcreens, Queen Sugar and Black Panther

Dr. Manuela Badilla, The New School, New York: Joyful Affects for decolonizing the difficult heritage in Chile (joining on zoom)

Artist and post.doc. Meghna Singh, Cape Town, SA: Black Futurity and the world of activism: Reimagining the future via digital occupations from Cape Town.

Performing arts curator, dramaturge and writer Florian Malzacher, Berlin: “We are stardust. Billion year old carbon”. Curatorial speculations on the future”.

• Organizers: Peter Boenisch, Anika Marschall and Britta Timm Knudsen
• Co-founded by Uses of the Past.