Since they first domesticated the potato some 8000 years ago, Andean people have worked to shape thousands of varieties differing in form, texture, colour and taste. Conversely, this diversity contributes to the constitution of heterogeneous human bodies of highland cultivators who eat enough potato to consider themselves to be physically made of this tuber. Nourished by this bountiful crop, they spend daily efforts cultivating labour-intensive native varieties in the challenging ecologies of the Andean peaks. In these highland households, potatoes do not feature as food to be passively ingested; and rather as kin imbued with intentionality and affectivity. In the After Progress exhibition we present verses declaimed by cultivators to cheer tubers up and thereby sustain their growth. Besides, their public recitation on the Potato National Day proclaims highland dwellers’ entanglement with tubers - in a national context where a racist depiction of wretched Indianness was historically hinged upon a scorn for highland agriculture. As well as weaving potato-human relatedness in the ayllu, this tuberous aesthetic is intended as a cosmopolitical intervention reclaiming agricultural livelihood captured in the webs of capitalist exploitations.

Tuberous Respect after Progress – Praising Verses and Potato Flourishing in the Andean Highlands

Welcome to the non-definitive guide to the history of the third millennium! 
 
This archival project aims to be a living document of fragments, narratives, and artefacts of the astronomical years of 2000-3000 (or 12000-13000 Holocene Era/Human Era). As another chapter of the long, deep and convoluted histories of humanity, our understanding of life during this time is still very limited. It is for this reason that this archive is an open and collaborative one. Please feel free to edit and submit any knowledge fragments to expand our compendium on what life was like in one of the earliest millennia of human life on earth.

Chronicles of the Third Millennium

"For the Love of Corals: An Ecology of Perhaps" are polyphonic writings and readings taking as their starting point Derek Walcott's famous poem, "The Sea is History" (1979), to weave together artist Sonia Levy's research at the Horniman Museum and Gardens for her film " For the Love of Corals", with ruminations by the philosopher Martin Savransky on the precarious lives of corals in the ecological hold of a perhaps, of the faint possibility of inhabiting the Earth otherwise. 
 
The Great Barrier Reef off Cairns, Australia, has seen one of its warmest summers in 2020, and with it, yet another mass coral bleaching event. Some of the features of the polyphonic composition and text are connected and respond to near-real-time sea temperature data from Cairns collected by NOAA Coral Reef Watch. 
 
The text and sound provide continuities and resonances to its visual inquiries. How to inherit the precariousness of our earthly present? How to sustain endangered worlds and stories? How to tell stories in uncertain times? How to attend to the interstices where lives and worlds are made inside and in spite of ongoing devastation, bleaching and extinction?

For the Love of Corals: An Ecology of Perhaps

Together with the changes brought by climate change, humanity now faces extreme resource scarcity and the rise of totalitarian governance over food systems in the future. All seed and food production and distribution went under the governmental line of production, ENFI. For citizens living under this totalitarian regime, everything seems on track... until two friends decide to connect the remaining communities that still reclaim their independent seed conservation outside the regimes of the ruling empires... 
 
In a world shaped by an extremely technocratic response to climate crisis and resource management, could it be possible to retrieve the knowledge on lost seeds, indigenous medicine, biodiverse agroecology, and the use of hallucinogenic plants?

The Lost Seeds of Knowledge

Notes on the Ruins Garden' is a personal diary kept in real time alongside the making of a garden. Two years prior to the writing of text, the diary-keeper moved to a new tenement building, at the bottom of which stood a communal garden, overgrown and seldom visited by humans, save to dump large objects into the dilapidated sheds or to drink out of sight. The diary charts the second spring the author spent inserting herself into this ecosystem and examines interactions between beings as they move about the space. The practice of garden-making in this space involves keen observation of patterns, a desire to interact and a penchant for debris, repurposing tyres, drawers, mirrors… 

Notes on the Ruins Garden

Today there are many reasons to denounce the institution of the university (the herald of pregressive knowlegde) and the stifling mechanisms of competition, bureaucratization, and optimization that govern it under the banners of Excellence. At the same time, however, within but also in the margins  of the university, people are coming together in the presence of objects and questions that they deem useful to study, both individually and collectively, and inventing ways to do so. So how to account for these multi-faceted realities? How to make visible what is hidden in plain sight? Perhaps simply by putting forward a question and let it pass from hand to hand without it exhausting itself, bouncing back and forth from one to another: “How do you come to study?” - in other words, where, with whom, when, and what do you study? We heard about ancient compilations of recipes that, as early as medieval times, were written down, tweaked and passed on in notebooks from one person to another: the book of secrets. It could be good vehicle, to move around to encounter other stories, but also to carry these stories elsewhere and disseminate them. A work in progress, after progress...

Ecologies of studies. A book of secrets

Systemisch produces the story of ecology as a social construct and evidences its  deterministic effect on the formation of consensus around what “nature” is. The story is conveyed in a booklike object called The Bulletin of Range and Precarity, the motto of which is "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

The Bulletin of Range and Precarity

Lacuna is an audio-visual story formed by fragmented layers of observing, thinking, shaping and interacting. The work gives a ‘voice’ to environments in Western Greenland, and conveys forceful encounters with ‘progress’. Lacuna explores discursive, poetic and descriptive forms of narration. 
 
The top of a mountain was removed to make an airport on the small island of Upernavik. An act of 'modernisation' appears as brutal force, yet at the same time enables new encounters. This is the place where the collaborators of Lacuna first met. 
We are an international and intergenerational group of four women: Upernavik resident, video artist, story-teller, air traffic controller, performance artist, administrator, landscape researcher, tourist operator, academic. 
 
We draw on New Materialism and Post-Humanism to acknowledge the complexities of thinking and creating in our contemporary moment. We adopt a speculative practice based approach and use a methodology where one insight is read through another, allowing productive difference to manifest. 
 
We implement collective thinking and making to enable global conversations on Nordic issues to flourish and ask; how can one take a critical position yet at the same time benefit from a violent act? 
 
Lacuna is funded by Nordisk Kulturfond Opstart

Lacuna

How to live together apart? The lost, the present, the catastrophic interfere. This mode of subsistence we call hypostasis. No place left for conservation of existence. Metastable continuities emerge. Lives overlap and chimeras appear. It is the proliferation of chimeras and chimeric proliferation that comes after progress. Hypostasis favours para-normal norms and normalities neighbouring each other. It also negates any single "new" normality. These paranormalities demand new vernacular practices and research approaches, e.g. incorporeal architectures and ghost geographies. Above all, paranormal hypostasis demands chimeric thinking.

We Are Lives

The Terrifying and Bizarre Demons of the Barn is a collection of seven short stories that blend a variety of horror writing with authoethnographic experience within rural and agricultural landscapes. Accompanied by images from one of the author’s own family photos, these stories are meant to displace the reader about what they know or how they conceptualize rural and farm environments, stereotypes, and experiences. This is done through the lens of gothic, rural, and backwoods horror genre traditions based on the lived experienced from the authors’ perspectives of rural areas and immigrant identities. These stories focus on the decay of recognizable farm landscapes and subverting the perceptions and experiences that city-dwellers have with farms. It details the isolation of rural communities and the increased alienation of these communities with the rise of agricultural practices reframed as something boutique and niche for urban societies to the point of becoming a tourist commodity. Written from the perspective of an unnamed farmer, this collection is meant to demonstrate not only how much modernity has skewed the understanding of rural lifestyles, but also how it has impacted and defamiliarized the landscape for those who have lived in these communities their entire lives.

The Terrifying and Bizarre Demons of the Barn

The city of Bruxl is entering a period of strict quarantine: any trade of seeds is now forbidden because a mutated fungus has been detected in the city’s crops. Our story follows the travel of Rob’, a native of Bruxl who grew up and lives in Madrid. S·he is deeply concerned with what s·he sees as the beginning of a widespread privatization of seeds. S·he sets off to Bruxl in order to bring some free and reproducible seeds to counter the prohibition. The journey between the two cities is a long and exhaustive one: Rob rides per bike and embarks on ships along the remaining commercial routes of Western Europe. Along the way, the story unfolds this young idealist’s hopes of spreading per know-how about the reproduction of domesticated plants in a world where honey-bearing insects have almost disappeared. In parallel it tracks the evolution of the situation in Bruxl where the fungus invades all the monocultures, as well as the news Rob’ receives from per twin sister, who lives in Bruxl and is now in love with a technophile young man from the uptown neighborhoods.

Flourishing

The story originates from a brief ethnography authors carried out and tells about Sant’Erasmo, the biggest island in the Venice lagoon. For years the island has been experiencing a gradual depopulation due to unfavourable housing policies which also led to a progressive abandonment of the crops. The opportunity to investigate and relate with locals gave us the chance to imagine some possible or uchronic scenarios for this out-of-standard island. In order to illustrate how differently progress could be considered, this work will develop around three different scenarios, each composed by a narrative combined with an image.

Uchronic Sant'Erasmo. Going through unknown novels from the lagoon progress

As a part of the research on notions of nature I’ve conducted in, the Arabian Gulf and its highly petrolised landscape, I’ve come to perceive the existence of oil, and other anthropogenic materials as closely related to those of spirit masters for animist human groups—as animated matter with agendas of its own. I’ve come across several academic texts within the humanities calling for contemporary mythological narratives. Therefore, I’ve taken the works of contemporary philosophers as those of prophets, and have written a narrative mimicking the form of sacred texts. I depart from Reza Negarestani’s premise, that underground life entities are pitted in battle against terrestrial solar-powered life in a millenary energetic battle. I take examples of several amazonian tribes and their ontologies to further point out parallelism between them and our seemingly secular Modern societies. Finally, I use Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects as the (almost) literal western translation of spirit masters, as entities that are too vast, powerful, and time-stretched for us to make them intelligible. And, most importantly, I highlight the ways in which these processes render human lives and projects minuscule and subordinate to immensely larger powers and their intentions.

Severed Light

Who are the marginalised in our Mother Nature? Weeds draw the scenery of outskirts in the natural landscape, following an unguided path below a gloomy Anthropocentric climate. Yet, why would a ‘weed’ be defined as a ‘weed’, but not a ‘plant’? 
 
Urban weeds, as the everyday greenery, reveal another level of intelligence in this digital age. The notion of ‘weeds’ rejects conventional biological classifications of plants into genera and species. Instead, weeds signify a specific type of autonomous and nomadic vitality; an imagination of alternative hope within a mainstream spectacle. Relentless and dynamic, they resonate with the ceaseless drive nowadays to redefine the relationship between human and nonhuman thingness. 
 
By studying weeds, the photographs look at how these plants hide in drains, squeeze through cracks in concrete surfaces, evade human dominance and subvert the contemporary city.

Weeds: Worlds that They Edge

the impasse 
as an actual street, as a no-through-road, as an obstacle on your way to somewhere, as something that forces you to detour, as a state of being stuck or a dead end. We take the impasse as a starting point for speculation, which (paradoxically) embraces blockage, pause and interruption of movement. 
 
participate 
Our contribution is intended as a collaborative project. Browse through the encyclopedia and add your thoughts, ideas or any material. 
 
context 
We draw on the impasse as a turn-around of thought, whose traces assume shape in some sort of broken encyclopedia. We imagine this to be an encyclopedia as a continuous gathering of knowledge, that no longer idealizes objectivity, neutrality and completeness but focuses on contradictory definitions and perspectives. A lexicon entry in such an encyclopedia is not providing digestible summaries, its lemmas are by definition not definatory: they can articulate themselves in raw and intricate ways instead - whether that might be an ever expanding bunch of loosely connected terms, a gif, picture or song, a list or poem. Each potential lemma is thus itself a situated and specific expression of continuously experiencing world(s).

notes from the impasse

Our planet is a complex and fragile system. Accelerating progression and human activities drive environmental impacts that can destabilize the Earth. The Planetary Boundaries concept identifies nine biophysical processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system. Boundaries are proposed for each of these processes, that delimit where large-scale irreversible environmental changes are expected to occur. 
 
Stable Unstable Earth is a generative and interactive audiovisual piece where you can explore how our accelerating human impact drives the exceedance of the Planetary Boundaries and their self-reinforcing interactions. Listen to the dynamic interactions between the Earth system processes themselves, or interfere directly with the processes’ inherent system logics.

Stable Unstable Earth

Stand By is a speculative renderization of feelings of neglected technoscientific agencies in outer space. 
 
For humans, machines are at our service and get influenced by the tasks they were created for. Sometimes added to their intrinsic value comes the technological fate of becoming spatial debris or ending in an endless idle. Do these machines have feelings? Are the capable of having an aesthetic experience? 
 
Stand By is a CG imaginary that deals with the moments of ""stand by"" or the forced out of service of those machines that have been propellers of human progress. This project is an attempt to fantastic dignification presenting a solitary Martian robot as a conscious and active participant in the work for which she was programmed. 
 
Any form of construction of a new idea of progress must also take into account these agents of technoscience. Machines are at the expense and service of human growth and because of their lack of a conscience, deprived of mercy, or deliberately left behind. We cannot imagine a post-progress without taking into account machines and technological agencies. They must have a place in the process of planing a tomorrow besides pure utilitarianism.

Stand By

"Monica Byrne says ""in 30 years, the world will be unrecognisable from what it looks like today. But how it will be unrecognisable is up to us. In this historical moment, science fiction literature has a very unique place in terms of helping us imagine a better world.""[1] 
 
With this in mind, the contributors engage visionary fiction[2] as a tool for building positive, radical, but realistic visions of the future to regenerate our imaginations and inspire pathways towards a better[3] Anthropocene. 
 
We ask: if Progress is a boundless, linear, and upwards trajectory, can After Progress be joyfully limited; elastic, polycultural, and plural; balanced, planet scale, and compassionate? 
 
We explore these definitions through interconnected stories of the land and ways of living that work within Mother Earth's limits — so she flourishes rather than suffers — and humans are ""living not just to the point of survival, but to the point of pleasure"". 
 
The resulting experimental iterative narrative takes the form of concatenated communications sent between women across generations, unfolding echoes between the far future and distant past. 
 
Before When We Were Separate envisions a future where Nature has rights, community is a practice, and humans are doing the essential work to regenerate the Earth. The story centres Indigenous knowledges and practices to reframe humans' relationship with Nature and support multispecies flourishing. 
 
References 
 
(1) SPACE10 Session: The Age of Emergency with Monica Byrne. May 5, 2020. 
(2) Visionary Fiction: Writing Our Future with Walidah Imarisha https://radicalimagination.us/episodes/visionary-fiction 
(3) Daisy Ginsberg: Better (PhD) https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/better 
(4) adrienne maree brown: the return of the pleasure activist https://adriennemareebrown.net/2010/11/11/the-return-of-the-pleasure-activist/

Before When We Were Separate

“After work” is an invitation to explore the impact of the changes in work-life in the post-corona context and its effect on the broader political, social, and economic functions of the European city. The tales bring to life how workspace, labour, and everyday life connect in wicked and messy ways that are often omitted in the desire to find consensus or to provide precise solutions. The amplification of ambiguities, conflicts, and contradictions invites the readers to navigate the complicated relationships between fact and fiction within the recent post-work related discussions. By naming and framing these patterns, the stories act as interactive systems (newspapers, card games, board games, performances, playbooks etc.) that provide various stakeholders with the opportunity to take part in a broader reflexive exercise about their values and priorities.

After Work: A Series of Cautionary Tales

In this story, a future society is imagined, in which funeral practices at odds with natural systems have been abandoned in favour of more sympathetic and natural ways of dealing with the dead. The narrative follows (and then discards) a group of Layers, who trek to an open-air burial site named Welterusten, to lay a corpse upon the mountainside. Once the Layers have performed their duty, the focus shifts to the necrobiome at work around the corpses, from the blowflies and their maggots, to the vultures, jackals, and flowers who all benefit from this system. The story explores the entanglement of creatures (including humans) and the mountain landscape, and imagines a future in which human-nature separateness disintegrates in the face of nature’s profuse intelligence. The descriptions of the landscape and creatures in the story are loosely based on the Silvermine Nature Reserve, which is part of the Table Mountain National Park in Cape Town, South Africa.

Like Lichen on the Mountain Rocks

Come sit down for a Long Story (short). This one is as long and deep as the history of the Earth. Join a multi-species cast on a journey into the future in search of better pastures. Travel hundreds, thousands, and millions of years to explore a changing, restless world: hot and swampy one era, cool and arid the next. What will you and your companions make of this shifting, fluctuating landscape? How will you adapt to its changes, and most importantly, will you find what you are looking for? 
 
This is a hypertext game written using a free software called Twine (www.twinery.org). It is an adaptation of what was initially conceived as a LARP, but which, during the Coronavirus pandemic, was forced to change its shape. Players familiar with the structure of Nordic LARP will recognize the gradual build-up to the play phase, and the use of refrains and repetition to pace the story.

Long Story (short)

The Brooklyn Seed Lab is a speculative design project that imagines environmental futures through fictional seed catalogs. Brooklyn Seed Lab is imagined as a community seed library, food farm, and biodesign space that provides local plants, pollinators, and biodesigns to future residents of New York City. The catalog reflects a changing environment and highlights issues such as drought, extinction, global warming, and other events related to the climate crisis. Some of the elements in the catalog are squarely in the realm of design fiction, such as bionic birds and biomates, or living garden companions that bring biology and technology together in novel ways. At the same time, there are familiar everyday elements that you might find in any contemporary seed catalog, such a varieties of fruiting trees, herb gardens, and helpful tips about grafting and pollination. The project utilizes creative commons images from the Biodiversity Heritage Library and aims to create a slightly unbalanced sense of time. The images evoke a vintage feeling to both reference old-fashioned seed catalogs as well as to suggest a step back towards ways of living that are more environmentally-friendly. However the items in the catalog reflect a future world that is steeped in technology, still tinkering with plants and animals, and pushing further towards the possibilities of biotech. This juxtaposition explores that ways in which we might balance technological development with more traditional environmental practices that have been with us for millennia. The seed catalog is meant to open up conversations about the future of food, plants, animals, urban gardening, and collective, community-based practices.  

Brooklyn Seed Lab

The cinematic VR360 film titled 'Off-network low-impact living on the cut', has been produced for the launch of the after progress exhibition on boattr.uk. The cinematic VR film is an expression of the researchers’ journey on the narrow-boat Quintessence (boattr.uk) on the British Waterways, looking into off-network, local network use of technologies, as a low-impact living on the cut. The ‘boattr – living on the cut’ immersive film depicts the cut and canals of the British Waterways as a digital urban commons, through the artists’ journey on the narrow boat ‘Quintessence’ and the development of the ‘boattr’ prototype in collaboration with MAZI (for “together” in Greek), a Horizon2020 research project. Having operated the boattr.uk, mazizone and 7061 art project over three years, this story, in form of a VR360 film and website, documents the development of this research. 
 
With the evolution the moving image inserted itself into broader, everyday use, but also extended its patterns of effect and its aesthetical language. Video has become pervasive, importing the principles of “tele-” and “cine-” into the human and social realm, thereby also propelling “image culture” to new heights and intensities. The boattr VR360 film makes use of video as theory, reflecting the structural and qualitative re-evaluation it aims at discussing design and organisational level. In accordance with the qualitatively new situation video is set in, the VR360 film presents a multi-dimensional matrix which constitutes the virtual logical grid of the boattr project.

Off-network low-impact living on the cut

The Aftermath Atlas is presented as a “publishers preview” of a future book written in 2075. It details the startling discovery, made in the early 2070s, that Landsats 18 and 19 – a pair of Earth observation satellites powered by sophisticated machine learning architectures – have been producing spontaneous compositions of visual art and poetry outside of their respective mission taskings. This preview showcases a selection of these compositions, alongside an introductory essay that contextualises their origins and highlights their conceptual significance for navigating the extreme challenges of life on a profoundly damaged future Earth.

The Aftermath Atlas

Over lockdown we have been meeting informally as a ‘listening group’. Inspired in part by Michael Ende’s novel Momo, we wanted as a group to create slow, spacious and rich occasions for listening and reflecting on listening. Momo, wrote Ende, ‘could listen in such a way that confused or indecisive people suddenly knew what they wanted. Or shy people felt free and courageous all at once. Or unhappy and downhearted people became confident and joyful.’ The small, slow, spacious activity of lingering over listening that we have engaged in might be viewed as a resistance, of sorts, to ‘modern’, ‘industrial’, ‘fast’ and ‘instrumental’ modes of communication and being, and in this sense it can surely be heard in resonance with the theme of After Progress. 
 
In response to the call for stories we have generated six sound pieces in the form of short audio files designed to allow others to listen in to our listening group. They are designed to give an inkling of what can emerge when a few people listen to each other over time, and then listen to their listening. For the most part these short sound pieces are composed out of extracts from our recorded conversations. One of them, for example, gathers all the non-verbal, phatic and background noises. Another is composed only of mentions of encounters and another meditates on listening spaces. Another is more conceptual, aiming to reflect on the way a listener contributes to creating the coherence of what they hear. The exception to this rule of using excerpts from our conversations is the one called During listening, after progress, which narrates part of the abstract we used when submitting our proposal for this experiment and so provides some background. The sound pieces can be listened to in whatever order the listener prefers. We enjoyed experimenting with these objects and have become ever more fascinated with the mysteries and banalities of listening, and we hope that some of our enjoyment and fascination comes through. Let there be listening.

Listening After Progress

TransHuman Saunter is a geolocative artwork that documents the entanglements of four women artists with the multispecies ecosystem of the Indian Banyan Tree. These entanglements constitute re-created and re-imagined narratives of their relationship with the nonhuman colonised Indian Subcontinent being: Indian Banyan Tree. The work further builds its foundations on themes of multispecies relationships with the “nonhuman” Banyan Tree, colonialism, mythologies, migration, oppressions, the artists’ own micro-narratives of being ‘lesser’ humans and everyday living in Australia. This is further juxtaposed with human-planetary crises of climate change, forest fires, a pandemic: all psychosis of disjointed human/nonhuman entanglements. This artwork digitally locates itself in Australia and on the Indigenous land of the Turrbal and Yuggera people. In engaging with the Indian Banyan Tree, the artists hope to provide a space to transcend and disrupt colonial forms of knowing so as to heal and repair. The work is a contribution to the pluralistic ways of knowing through an evocation of the narratives of the unseen: the “lesser”-humans, the “non”-humans, and the “non”-beings.

TransHuman Saunter: Multispecies Storytelling with the Indian Banyan Tree

This short story, set in Malaysia, narrates the gentle rhythm of life in a kampung (Malay for ‘village’) centred on a family and their web of relations. The COVID-19 pandemic is used as a point of rupture that exposes the paradox of progress in a number of ways. Abah, the father character yearns for physical, face-to-face interactions, an intimacy that cannot be substituted with virtual techno-fixes. In her dealing with Uncle Cheong, a fisherman, Mak (the mother) foregrounds the notion of rezeki (Malay for ‘sustenance’) that counterbalances financial transactions with other forms of reciprocity and serendipity. The fisherman is part of a fishery collective with the Orang Asli (indigenous people) that has been reforming inter-species relationships. The story’s main narrator—the unnamed son—teaches in a school that is intimately embedded in the local environment. When the great flood hits the kampung—a frequent fixture in the aftermath of progress—ways of living together in ruins are activated. The story is interweaved with the characters’ potent memories as resources for living, flirting with the idea of linear time—which way is backward, forward and around in pursuit of (after) progress?

Rezeki

Nestled beyond the railway line, the industrial estate, the main road and the houses at Islands Brow in St Helens sits the Burgy Banks. Toxic industrial slag heaps choc-full with lead and cadmium, the wet and dry burgies are a product of the towns glass-making history, pumped into the earth just under a hundred years ago. Drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway this experimental piece of writing attempts to tell a story of this place which is speculative, joyful and not compelled by progress bound ways of knowing. Making use of local stories, myths, and multispecies activity in this landscape, through the night-time rhythms of the Burgy Beast I hope to draw out and speculate about polyphonic and relational activity at work here. This story aims to conjure multiple temporalities and create ‘useful fiction’ (Kenney, 2019, 11) about a place usually only synonymous with industrial progress and decline. Taking energy from the town’s motto ‘Ex Terra Lucem’ (from the earth, light), I’ll attempt to tell another story, one which works outside the stories of death and progress-time we have come to expect.

From the earth, light

The project revisits three Russian water reservoirs – colloquially known as “seas” – to interrogate the progressive narrative of Soviet modernity by producing stories beyond this violent and reductive framework. As part of The Great Volga (1930s-1970s), a large-scale industrial endeavour that reorganised the flow of the Volga River to supply a slew of new infrastructure developments, these reservoirs were constructed on the ruins of the submerged towns: Korcheva, Kalyazin and Mologa. While this story remains largely excluded from the historical narrative, water oscillations disclose lingering residues and illuminate historiographical voids. By engaging with objects discovered in field trips to these towns – a sculpture, a photograph, and an architectural model – this project offers a way to reconsider the histories of the drowned places that persist underwater, in-between spaces, in memory, and through material artefacts.

Stories for the Hydraulic Seas on the Volga

This piece of fictocriticism interweaves fragments of Bernard Stiegler's «Technics & Time» (1994) with lyrics from Björk's song "Vertebrae by Vertebrae" (2007) and lines from Miyazaki's «Princess Mononoke» (1997) to explore the theoretical un-building of the technologized body. Fictocriticism is a particular method of writing that deliberately blurs the distinction between literary criticism and literature. This is accomplished through a strategic mixing of registers and a nomadic shifting between/among the genres of fiction, autobiography and academic essay. Accordingly, the text samples the above pieces of media, highlighting their shared conceptual focus on teknē and the evolution of the human via prosthetic engagements with nature, or "technological progress". By amalgamating them into a single text through a collage-like methodology, moments of interruption and incoherence are preserved and allowed to take on meaning in themselves, foregrounding the intrinsic partiality of writing and of bodies, in general. Not unlike the implosive cyborg body envisioned by Donna Haraway (1985) or the participatory network of ergodic literature described by Espen Aarseth (1997), this piece seeks to question whether bodies can ever be considered whole or unto themselves—a concept that undergirds neoliberal and techo-capitalist ideas of 'progress'.

Up on the Toe (Unbuilding a Body v.1.0)

after the forest/tar éis an choill is a meditation on the local effects of the capitalocene, an attempt to understand relationships between humans and non-humans through describing the afterburn of colonialism in Ireland. Though many of the issues explored - language and habitat loss, invasive species and extractivism - operate on a planetary level - I believe it is only through concentrating on the local that humans can attempt to understand the consequences of destructive economic and social systems. In after the forest/tar éis an choill I focus on two zones local to me in West Cork, Ireland and use them as a way to read the current era, through writing a narrative of human and non-human histories of this landscape.

after the forest/tar éis an choill

What does the world look like after the apocalypse, after humanity has been wiped out and nothing remains but the devastated wasteland of a world without hope? There only is one solution: re-set the earth, return to status quo. But what does that actually look like?

Re-Set

From Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius to Fernando Savater’s Ética para Amador, one of the historically important genres adopted in educational writing has been the letter whereby an adult/educator addresses a child/educatee, pivoting on moral education understood as a form of care of the self. The letter in this sense is a kind of écriture de soi and, thus, a vehicle for the cultivation of the arts of living. 
 
Drawing upon this model and inflecting it to a (science) fiction mode, we present different epistolary exchanges that take place between ourselves in our present time – ensnared in the convulsions of the Anthropocene – and our (human and non-human) descendants/children in an era yet-to-come. Thus, we frame storytelling about “ways of living and dying outside the coordinates of modern progress” as a series of educational letters understood in a broad sense. We set up threads of conversation between past, present and future. These developed into: 
 
1.	a correspondence with the future; 
2.	what we have called the Cyborg Chat Box; 
3. hand-written, posted letters; 
 
This story aspires to offer an opportunity of collective thinking about education after progress.

Educational correspondances. An attempt at epistolary with the future

The Flood is a story about being caught in a flash flood in a remote part of Australia. The story begins with a sense of knowing what might be there in the story, but also stages an encounter with what is not yet known. Inspired by Haraway and others, I wrote the story in order to participate in a ‘becoming-with’ the story, keeping open the possibility of what other stories this story might have to tell. I began with the proposition that the time of the flood was one of kairos—an event drawn from a more ongoing time (chronos) in which the elements, such as the rain, play a major part. But as time went on, another story came out, which is one of the event of the flood as a time of missing—not as a time of coming together but as one of coming apart. It turns out that what moved in the place was a story about love, humility and gratitude. Further still, a story had to come out about the shame and embarrassment of offending custodial responsibility, and speaking about it. The story reflects themes of ethics, temporality and ontology through various threads of love. The story reflects themes of ethics, temporality and ontology and forms part of a broader enquiry into humiliation and the feeling of being obliged. See for example Cefai (2020).

The Flood [1]

"From Pandemic to Pancratic – Draft of a Manual for Quarantine as Governance" deals with the viral conditions of cultural production during the pandemic at large, and how this has infected, transformed and mutated society, politics and culture. In so doing the text traces the cultural roots of the pandemic back to Pan and ancient Greece, while projecting a pancratic society into a dystopian realist future.

From Pandemic to Pancratic – Draft of a Manual for Quarantine as Governance

This story is a theory-fiction which tackles three historical moments that, concatenated, speak of a machinic cycle that we problematize as the driving force underneath Chile’s techno-economical landscape of the last fifty years. This period, we argue, operates as an example to understand the global unfolding of capitalist realism, and what the struggles toward a post-capitalist stage may look like. 
 
These moments are: the early 1970s attempt for the development of a cybernetic-socialism, an aesthetics of cynicism embodied in film productions from the early 2000s, and a radical counter-aesthetics deployed by Chile’s 2019 social uprising.  
 
The story is structured in three sections; each of them formed by six short paragraphs, where the first is a pure fiction, and the next is a critical theoretical comment. The goal is to delineate what we call a cyclical machine, which could serve as an abstraction of the struggling forces traversing this entire period.

Three Atmospheres of Fiction and Theory for One (Post)Capitalist Struggle

This script is based on a collaboration between performers and a poet in recovery from drug and alcohol dependency, a director, and a researcher. We were brought together in 2017 by our shared interest in theatre as a mode of telling substance use stories differently and telling different kinds of substance use stories. Drama has a unique ability to stir memories and ideas through embodied movement and collaboration. In this play, we were drawn to the theme of ‘drug-related deaths’ as an ongoing public health crisis in the UK that despite getting worse every year for nearly a decade has received very little governmental action. We wanted to raise awareness of this emergency while also working to complicate the usual stories that get told around drugs as unilaterally harmful and spotlight the complex lives of the people behind the statistics. Given its troubling subject of drug-related deaths, the play refuses to tell a ‘good’ story. Instead, we aim to provoke and confuse, and with this, invite audiences to ask questions of our relationship to drugs, how we know and tell stories about them, what it is that makes them harmful, and how we can learn to live with them better.

Brown Bread

​​Insectarium is a story in sound of a walk in the woods in three pieces. It pays attention to the spaces and rhythms of sensory encounters with insects in Western Uusimaa region, Southern Finland. 
 
Making use of bioacoustic ecosystem monitoring devices, it is a meditation on perceived, enhanced and possible sounds of a forest.

Insectarium

The montage takes its cue from a visit to a tamarind allée in Kponko Ghana, planted by Danish colonists, and traces the trees to the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen. Colonial history has interlinked the world we inhabit today and brought a multiplicity of perspectives together. Oftentimes in cultural confrontation as we recently saw in the decolonial protests that swept the globe during the Covid-19 pandemic, posing for us an important task: How to accommodate multi-perspectival storytelling of shared pasts in a globally entangled and environmentally threatened future? 
 
This montage is an elaboration on overlapping and shared histories of the past as they take shape in present day soundscapes. The montage includes conversations with curator Jesper Kurt Nielsen from the National Museum of Denmark, professor Ole Seberg from the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen, and William Nsuiban from the National Museum of Ghana.

Tamarind Tales

The montage Tamarind Tales connects colonially entangled environments in Ghana and Denmark interlinked by the presence of tamarind trees (tamarindus indica). The initial scene plays out in Kponko, Ghana, where William Nsuiban from the National Museum of Ghana counts the remaining tamarind trees from an allée built along an old existing footpath from the Christiansborg fort on the former Gold Coast up to the Frederiksgave plantation, at the foot of the Akwapim mountains. The trees were planted by Danish colonizers to provide shadow for when they were carried to the plantation in hammocks by African enslaved. Apparently, tamarinds were a favorite of the Danes, indicating their presence in various Ghanaian locations. Then follows an interview with Jesper Kurt Nielsen from the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen about his involvement in the project of rebuilding Frederiksgave and the broader plantation environment (the Frederiksgave Plantation and Common Heritage Site). Lastly, Ole Seberg, head of the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen, tells us about the heart of the botanical garden’s species collection, collected as part of the colonial endeavor to map the world and extract resources, and how also quite recently tamarind cuttings from Kponko made their way to the old colonial metropole. 
 
The underlying premise of this story is the plight of climate change due to the geo-morphic agency on a large scale by humans in the modern global world system. A consequence of the colonial legacy in spaces and minds, and landscapes. We are curious to explore how tamarinds as a prism unfold stories about the changing and eroding landscapes, and how this reflects large-scale trends as summarized by concepts of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene or Plantationocene. How do the trees function as storied matter? That is thoroughly NOT as themes or tropes connecting places in a purely representational media ecology, but rather as active producers of environments and as co-creators of material archives for a humanist production of history. In what ways do they link up with other species and materialities as hybrid and traveling agencies and make themselves available to us as a storytelling resource, through a combination of biological conditions of growth and epistemological or ideological inclinations to preserve them instead of using them as firewood, for example? In short: How do the trees themselves push into the future archive of colonial history? And in addition: What are the different affordances offered by them to tell stories of contemporary affects and ambiances.

“No longer” is a short free-verse poetry with abstract images, altogether showing what might “no longer” happen. It describes the norms and practices that might no longer exist in the future arrangements of human existence “after progress”. The theme is with strong elements of the natural world or the human and more-than-human dynamics, including subjects on climate change, reproduction & sexuality and nature. The images that go with the words are subtle, abstract figures to represent the arbitrary and vague norms we have and how these might awkwardly or delightfully change in the future. 
 
This work serves as a counterpart contribution to the expectations not to exist “after progress”. While there are things we can anticipate to evolve years from now, imagining what we will miss can also be instructive for us to reconsider our present human actions. This submission is not meant to be a guide to the future but rather serves as a reminder of the fluid and tenacious realities in human existence, be it in terms of materiality, symbolism or human relationships. Whatever happens after progress, may we have the courage to embrace how things in our lives will “no longer” be.

No Longer

In 1824, Joseph Aspdin registered a patent for the first formula of Portland cement, concrete’s main ingredient, a substance that has contributed to advancing modern narratives of progress. Subtitled ‘Artificial Rock’, Aspdin’s patent distinctively emphasised human exceptionalism. In a blink of an eye, from the viewpoint of humanity’s deep past, concrete turned in the course of the twentieth century into the most abundant anthropic rock in earth history, suffocating the exchange of nutrients and energy across earth and sky out of which plants and many other forms of life had historically flourished in the midst of soil. This alternative patent subtitled ‘Technosols’ and submitted in 1920 by a group of British pedologists (soil scientists) and in direct response to Aspidin’s patent, predicted that, given enough time, concrete would crack and crumble due to seasonal weathering, and soil growth would soon ensue, letting plants and other organisms settle and thrive. They claimed that this should be achieved by collaborating with other-than-human forces and entities, such as the weather, microbes and worms. Although concrete had been patented to suppress life, it was unexpectedly contributing to the rise of future urban pedogenesis.

An Anti-Patent for Future Soils

Our story is set in the not-so-distant future after progress. After the decision was made to pull the emergency brake and prevent the catastrophe, the process has begun of assembling a new world out of the ruins of the old one. Relapse report is an account of a person living in this emergent world, reporting relapse into the old ways of thinking. The story marks the drug-like effect of the notion of progress — its addictiveness and irresistibility, making us crave it even if we are aware of its false promises and catastrophic consequences. With our story we ask: What makes us desire progress? What would happen to our desire for individual progress in an alternatively organized world? And what to desire instead, if we truly want to enact the world after progress?

Relapse Report

Futuring Mental Health is about imagining a different and better future for mental health. It is written in diary form. 
 
Theresa hears voices since she was a child. In our current society, she enters a spiral of diagnostic labelling and ends up as a chronically ill young woman, excluded from work and friendships. But she opens a door to a different future life. Here society understands that prevention is crucial for good mental health and that the arts, in the form of creative enquiry, have an important role to play towards it. Through her art making as a child, a teacher understands young Theresa’s concerns. This becomes the key moment for preventing her from suffering mental health difficulties later in her life. 
 
Here are some links to organisations and platforms which work for a better future for mental health: 
 
– https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sed/aboutus/events/mad-hearts/ 
– https://www.bps.org.uk/power-threat-meaning-framework 
– https://adisorder4everyone.com 
– https://sites.google.com/view/humanflourishingmeded/home/ 
– https://www.criticalpsychiatry.co.uk 
– https://developingopendialogue.com 
– https://www.hearing-voices.org 
– https://www.madheartists.org 
 
Futuring mental health is also a dream of a society which understands that art engagement is a universal need, and that it should be embedded in everyday life, at home, school, work, and beyond. We hope to make you dream with us.

Futuring Mental Health

2017 
 
Thursday 5th January 
Dear Diary, I’m 17 today. I failed my GCSEs last summer. Since then, I’ve been hearing a new voice called Bob. 
 
You know I‘ve been hearing things since I was a child, voices that other people can’t hear, but they usually don’t bother me. I can take comfort in them… Sometimes they are scolding, but more often they tell me to be brave, and that Mum will not die. 
 
Sunday 8th January 
Bob has a real nose for stuff and he can smell the foul food that Mum and Dad give me. I know they put poison in it, but I’m never quite sure when or in which dishes, but Bob always knows. I’m glad he’s here. 
 
Friday 20th January 
Bob has turned weird. He’s gone really nasty. He scares me. First he warns me about the poison and then he tells me to eat the poisoned food because I deserve to die. Since I realised that Bob wants me dead, I refuse all food prepared by my parents, even when Bob insists it’s safe. How can I trust Bob to tell me the truth, if he wants me dead?? 
 
 
Monday 30th January 
At school, teachers have started getting worried about me. I’ve lost a lot of weight. They think I’m suffering from anorexia. I only eat snacks that I can get from my friends, or that I can buy myself, so I know it’s safe, but my parents aren’t very happy to give me pocket money to buy food at school – they say it’s unhealthy. Isn’t it weird? They don’t want me to eat unhealthy food, when they are putting poison in my food at home! I could laugh about it, if I didn’t have to cry at how two-faced they are. 
 
Monday 20th February 
I’m writing this from the eating disorder unit. I’ve been an inpatient here for a week, but they are going to discharge me back home tomorrow. It didn’t take them long to realise that I am not anorexic… I told them! As soon as I was in hospital, I started eating voraciously, like a hospital buffet dinosaur! No one could make anything out of me, as all the other girls on the unit are very upset about having to eat any of the food on their plate, while I would eat all of theirs too. As long as my parents aren’t cooking, I’m not going to fuss about putting on weight! 
 
Wednesday 22nd February 
I’m back home now, they discharged me. And I, of course, have stopped eating again. But they’ve referred me to other doctors because they think I have psychosis. Mum and Dad are pretty upset. They’ve told me I’ve ruined their life. My younger sister is being bullied at school because some people in her class know that I am a freak. My father has his own mental health problems, when he was young, he was in hospital for some kind of psychosis. But that’s supposed to be a secret, I only found out a few years ago, by accident. One day my parents were quarrelling and my mother said to my father: “No wonder you’re this shit, they should lock you up again in that psychiatric hospital where you were before I met you”. He didn’t say anything in return, which surprised me quite a bit, as I thought he would be furious. I was 14 at the time and I knew I was not supposed to mention it, and I never did, until today, after they accused me of ruining their life, which I thought was quite hypocritical, especially coming from Dad. 
 
Thursday 30th March 
Yesterday I was off to see these other doctors, and I was hoping they would believe me and they would see how my parents are trying to poison me. I met a young doctor, Dr Eggs. He asked me lots of questions about the poisoning. He was so kind and I trusted him. I felt like he would believe me and I ended up telling him about Bob and the other voices in my head. Well, that’s what did it… He then went to speak to some superior doctor, the consultant I think, and then she came in and said that Dr Eggs was not qualified enough to ask me questions, she sat down and started asking me about other things - but she wasn’t interested in knowing what my voices were saying at all. She wasn’t even interested in the poisoning. She wanted to know when I started hearing voices, and how often did I hear voices in a week, and how was my mood on a scale from 1 to 10, and did I sleep at night, and how was my appetite… and that I thought was a useless question, given that I had proven I have a good appetite, when the food was not cooked by my mum or dad! She made a diagnosis of psychotic depression, and she gave me antidepressants and antipsychotics. Yesterday evening I took my first dose of medication and this morning I woke up a Zombie. 
 
 
 
Sunday 2nd April 
I’ve never felt this bad any time in my entire life. 
 
Monday 3rd April 
I feel awful. I can hardly move, my muscles are completely stiff, I feel nauseous, and I can’t think straight. I thought I might tell my parents I don’t want to go to school, but I am worried about the consequences. If I stay at home, with my parents seeing me like that, they may want to poison me even more. What’s the point in all this? Why am I not just killing myself? 
 
Tuesday 4th April 
I haven’t gone to school today. I spent the whole day in bed, feeling completely alone. My parents want me dead, I feel shattered, I don’t even have the strength to run away if they try to hurt me, and anyway, I wouldn’t know where to go. My sister is too young, my grandmother is in a care home and we don’t have any other close family, my friends wouldn’t understand and their parents definitely wouldn’t. Everyone would be scared of me. But where can I go? 
 
Wednesday 5th April 
I don’t know what I did today. Out of fear, I went to school, but I couldn’t even talk to my best friend. I looked strange to everyone, everyone was looking at me thinking: Wow, she’s a freak. All of that made me feel so upset, that I left school an hour early and I went wondering around the fields nearby. At a certain point, when I was walking near the canal, I found myself walking in the canal with the water up to my thighs and then I don’t know what happened, I think I heard some people shouting at me and then I found myself in hospital again. This time it is another ward and the bedroom is different. There are no decorations, only blank walls, and it feels like I have slept for a long long time. 
 
Monday 10th April 
I got to see the first doctor again, doctor Eggs, after a few days of being in here. I got to, because I wasn’t really speaking to anyone and I said I would only speak to the nice doctor, doctor Eggs. Eventually they made him come, and he was very nice again, and he was listening to me and asking me things, but something weird happened. When I told him that my parents were trying to poison the food again, he asked me why I thought my parents might want to poison me. And I was like: “How do I know? If I knew, I could do something about it, but I don’t!” After that, he started saying he didn’t think my parents were trying to poison me, he said “I’m sorry that you believe that, I can see how that would make you very upset, but if you could just trust me, that your parents are not trying to poison you, everything will be much easier”. But I’m not buying it, I think he’s been blackmailed into behaving like a ‘proper doctor’ and not believing his patients. And so I’ve decided not to talk to him either, and then I was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. 
 
Sunday 20th August 
Apologies for my long silence. I’m back home again. In hospital they gave me lots and lots of medications and I can promise you that I don’t remember what I was feeling then. I had no idea of what was going on, I was half asleep all the time, like being in a dream. And I remember patients around me smiling at me or asking me things, and there were people shouting at times, not at me, but between themselves, and I remember sometimes it was very quiet and sad and sometimes it was very lively and full of commotion. But overall, it’s like small bright flashes in a long dark stretch. I was in that hospital and then in another one, for about two months. And when Mum and Dad came to pick me up to take me back home, I could see how sad they were. There was a different look to them. They weren’t my usual parents, who were disappointed in me, and always thought I was causing trouble, and that I wasn’t a very good student, and that I behaved more like a boy than a girl, and that I always tried to put the blame on them, and all of that. They were very quiet, and their faces were so sad that I feel even more scared than before. If I am causing them all of these problems, why, why would they want me to live with them? So, even if they don’t kill me, they’ll kick me out of the house. 
 
Wednesday 27th September 
I’m not going back to school for the moment, I haven’t since April. I’ve tried to work in cafes, but it doesn’t last long. And in all of this, I still don’t agree with the medications. I complain about them all the time, that I don’t want to take them – because I don’t! - Everyone says I’m making a fuss. Last Sunday my father was so angry, he tried to force them down my throat, but I shouted at him, and Mum came and for once she took my side. She said to him: “I remember you told me you hated the medication when you were unwell. Leave her alone! Why would you want her to get the shit you didn’t want yourself?” 
 
Monday 2nd October 
They want to give me an injection, where I would be taking this drug not in my mouth but through my buttocks. A nurse would inject me once a month and then it would be fine, I wouldn’t have to fight against the medications anymore. But my mum actually went and took some advice from a friend and she didn’t want me to go down that route, so she asked if anything else could be done. And so now I’m waiting. Again. 
 
Saturday 21st October 
They’ve sent me to a very special clinic, it’s called ‘the professors’ clinic’ because the people running it are supposed to be very clever and to know much more about the brain and mental illness than anyone else. I went yesterday. They took me into a big meeting where there were also some medical students. They said I was a very interesting case and students could learn a lot from me. They asked me the usual questions, and then they asked me a question that no one had ever asked me before, which was whether the voices I heard were in my head or outside of it. And I said: ‘Of course they’re in my head, where do you think they are?’ And that seemed to throw everyone into a kind of frenzy and there was a very heated debate. I couldn’t really make out what it was about. 
 
Wednesday 1st November 
Last week I got a letter saying that my diagnosis has been changed from schizophrenia to borderline personality disorder. At my review this morning, the nurse started asking me about trauma and had anyone sexually abused me. I said no, I don’t think so. But then I looked it up online and found that many people don’t remember, especially if it happened when they were little, as they ‘dissociated’ from it whilst it was happening. So now I keep thinking about it… 
 
Friday 15th December 
This morning I got my ‘six-monthly review’ with my new doctor. He told me that they decided I have schizoaffective disorder and that it is most likely genetic. My father gave me the bad genes. I am now being injected every month with the antipsychotic, and I am entitled to disability allowance and I’ve found another part-time job in a café, and I am preparing to leave home to go into a protected accommodation on the hospital grounds. 
 
2018 
 
Friday 5th January 
18 today. No job, monthly jab. No friends, but my housemates are fine. Someone committed suicide in the house nearby. I wouldn’t have the energy for it. 
 
And I open a door onto the future. It is 20 years down the line, but I am still only 8 years old. 
 
2038 
 
Tuesday 5th January 
Dear Diary, I’m 8 today. One of my teachers is a bit worried about me, because of the stories I write. 
 
At school, we have an art room where we make art every day. We all go together, pupils and teachers. We can do what we like: draw, or dress up and play out a story, or play with the musical instruments. I like to write stories. And my stories are always about a young girl who gets lost somewhere, and she may never get back home, or her parents die, or, if she manages to reach the grandmother’s house, she finds an ogre instead. In one of my stories, the little girl has been kidnapped by the ogre and he wants to fatten her up, so that he can eat her, but she prepares some meatballs for him, as she knows he is very greedy, and she puts some poison in them, and he dies, and she can escape and manages to safely return home. She even gets a prize because she’s killed the nasty ogre, and she becomes quite rich. 
 
Friday 8th January 
My teacher asked me to tell her what was going on at home. I said I was scared that my mum would die. I don’t know if my mum is ill, but she often says that she may die and she told me once that I should be prepared to look after my little sister if it happen. I’m not sure why my dad couldn’t do that, but he’s always so miserable that I think he would die too, if my mum died. My grandmother is the only one who could help me, if she didn’t live far away. 
 
Wednesday 20th January 
At school I like to share my stories, because they can be funny, and I like to make people laugh. But my mum doesn’t like my stories, she always tells me to write about good things happening. Today she was so upset at my story where the ogre gets poisoned with the meatballs that she threw away a whole bunch of books with my favourite fairy tales. I cried a lot. 
 
Saturday 30th January 
Yesterday my teacher said she would speak to my mum and as it turns out, my mum will go for some therapy. I know adults do that sometimes, we have a teacher who says she goes to therapy. My mum is also using the art room at home much more than before. She does not want me to see what she writes, and that’s fine. Maybe she writes about her dad… 
 
My mum’s father was a soldier and a prisoner of war. When he came back home he was an invalid, and he died young, when my mum was still a little girl. When he was in the prison camp, he thought he had been given some poison, and that the poison had caused him all the problems with his health. I once asked my mum if it was possible that people could buy poison and put it in people’s food without them knowing, and she said yes. I think it is a very bad thing that people can kill other people without them knowing, and I wish poison did not exist, but then I think about the little girl with the ogre and that she would have been eaten if she didn’t poison him first, and then I’m not sure what to think any more. 
 
While Theresa’s mum is having some therapy, let’s look at the futuring of mental health. In 2038 everyone knows that art is as fundamental to mental health as healthy food is fundamental to physical health. TV programmes of the previous 15 years have advertised healthy art making. Everyone has been encouraged to participate. There are great artists, like there are great chefs, and they exhibit their work in art galleries and their plays show at the national theatre, and their music is broadcasted on the radio. But everyone is an artist, and produces work to share with their family and friends. Every house has an art room the same way every house has a kitchen and a toilet. Every school has an hour a day of creative enquiry where teachers and pupils come together to create and share, and they use the creative activities to talk to each other and discover things about themselves. Creative enquiry is also practised in hospitals and in health services, and staff and patients create together at dedicated times. It happens in nurseries and nursing homes. Some businesses have taken it on for their staff. Cafes have art spaces for their clients and their work is presented and exhibited in turns. 
 
In 2038 everyone knows that the only way to have good mental health is to work on prevention. Previous societies, of the 20th century, had thought that the right cure for mental health was to give everyone a pill. Research had shown that mental distress and mental illnesses were caused by trauma and injustices, like poverty, discrimination, racism, and other forms of oppression, and yet, they believed that the solution lied in making as many people as possible oblivious to these problems by giving them distractions and a lot of medications. Society was like a town council who leaves all the roads in disrepair, with big potholes and cracks, and all the citizens fall and break their legs, and then they take them off to hospital to put them in plasters and give them painkillers, and rates of people with broken legs and disabilities continue to grow, but the council never repairs the roads. Prevention is a difficult philosophy, because you cannot measure all the bad things that you have stopped from happening. Instead the council can measure how many broken legs there are in a year, and how many painkillers have been prescribed, and how many people recover the full use of the legs and how many remain disabled for the rest of their lives. 
 
 
In 2021 there was no more time to waste with climate change burning the earth and COVID killing and disabling millions more people. That’s how futuring mental health started. In 2038 the value of the arts for prevention has finally sunk in, but will it last? 
 
Thursday 21st October 
My mum has come back from her therapy. She is much happier than before, she and my dad are happier too, and they are going to have another little girl. 
 
Monday 1st November 
My mum bought me a beautiful collection of fairy tales with all my favourites, those that she had chucked away before. She also asked me to read them to my little sister and my new sister, when she comes. 
 
Wednesday 15th December 
I love reading stories to my sister, even if she gets a bit distracted and prefers to tear the book apart. But I don’t mind. I try and save the book, but even if she tears it a bit, it doesn’t matter, as I know all the stories by heart. 
 
2052 
 
Friday 5th January 
Dear Diary, 23 today. I’m a primary school teacher. I’m responsible for the art room and I love my job. Currently, I’m in a bit of a struggle with the management team, as they are reconsidering whether to reduce the art room activities to make space for more hours of mathematics and IT skills. I’m fighting against this. I know how important the art room has been for me. If I had not written about the little girl getting lost, and meeting ogres, perhaps no one would have noticed my struggles. Perhaps my mum would have never had therapy. Perhaps I would have ended up in a psychiatric hospital, like my dad did 30 years ago. Or perhaps I am exaggerating. I’ll never really know how it would have been. But I know that the art room was a place of healing for me. And luckily I am not alone. Other teachers are writing about their experience and petitioning for keeping the art room as it is, visited by pupils and teachers every day. Surely, management will understand.

THE APPOSITE OPPOSITE is a place only heard about in whispers and ravings of the dying. It is a new place of transition. What is unclear is where to and from, the place between death and life, where cuts open, (read Guattari's schizz) to upside-down reality and excoriate fear into a supra-comprehension of negotiating with reality. 
 
What if the real world was one that didn't progress? Was it imagined? Differences in the elders' movements, the newest trace passages between - learning, desisting, colliding, the flip and the switch. The experiences are multiple and beautiful. As soon as you settle in one place - the ""world"" pushes out into an extended bulb, allowing no rest, only movement out of human consciousness. Matrix meets National Geographic, meets Charles Atlas's Tesseract. 
 
You roll with the undulations in this scrying room, in tendrils of space that move you between this world and another, which is death? Which is life? Though it is slow and infinite, you sense it is not dangerous. You realize that everything you knew was a construct. 
 
The Apposite Opposite is improgress - an orb of sun pink, a blueberry barren summer, where a soul is gently guided to go or return.

The Apposite Opposite

Dear Ruth, 
 
The last seven weeks of my mother’s life, our blueberry barren summer, was the indecible and the indelible. I have notes of things she said, and we did, images of her and my father, images of sun soaked lawns and black-eyed susans, the encounter with the owner of the lands where where I helped myself to blueberries, a serious Mr. Jasper Wyman. 
 
My father said something yesterday, « she didn’t stop trying to live ». I think that’s true. This move back to Maine made her believe that the illness was contained in Connecticut, related to events there, a hospital bed there, not home there. And that by coming to her home to her house in Maine, she would be restored. Which indeed she was; She didn’t give in to the hospital bed ever, we moved her in the last few days only because she had nothing left to give to sit up, much less stand. 
 
She shined until she didn’t any longer. I found two postcards she started to write, one to her best friend from college, one to my sister’s Sarah’s husband. The scrawl is an artwork, almost undecipherable, and the one to her friend is simply addressed Anne Squier, Portland, Oregon. But she tried. 
 
I am frankly amazed how easy all of this was in all of its difficulty. I suppose like taking care of a child, or making art, if you are 100% available to the scrying bowl, anything is easy. It just flows, and that is how it was. 
 
She did say something in the last few days of her life, after the move to the hospital bed. She asked me if she was ill. I hesitated, looked at my father, not sure what to say. I said that I thought she was sick. It doesn’t feel like the right answer, because she asked me the next day, « Catharine, do you believe in illness? » This question haunts me. Do I believe in illness? Everything just is, isn’t it? Robert Thurman, an eminent Buddhist scholar who you likely know of, said once, « Cancer is perfectly healthy pink tissue, it just doesn’t get along with its neighbors. » 
 
She died as we were singing new invented verses to « She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes » . I still hear my Dad’s chuckle at one particularly funny verse that just showed up - « We’ll build an extra bedroom when she comes! » My mother fluttered a bit, reached for my sister Ragan’s hand and left. She dies around 6:30 Sunday evening, and at my insistence, we were able to keep her with us all night. I stayed with her, alternately sleeping, and vigiling, and in the morning, as if the most natural thing to do in modern America, in the year 2020, Ragan, Susannah and I washed her and prepared her for cremation. There was no distress. We then dressed her in new wild color pants Susi had given her, her favorite blue boatneck t shirt. She looked peaceful and lovely. 
 
It was her birthday the day before her death, one year ago today, and we were all there. I just imagined what it would have been like if we were all celebrating, and had to go to a hospital to see her 14 miles ways, a sterile place where the walls can be washed with a hose. Being part of the whole life, being part of the whole experience, being part of the end, just being part, felt so right. Death no longer separate and feared, but part. part and parcel, I have always liked that expression. part and parcel. I am not even sure if that is exactly it, and where it comes from. Part. Parting. Parted. 
 
Much love, 
Catharine

NARRATOR is caught in a storm on their way home back down a mountain and seeks shelter in a nearby cabin. They are under strict instruction to avoid images and songs. As night descends, images appear in the cabin through a small pinhole and so begins a conversation between the narrator and the upside-down images that come from ELSEWHERE. 
 
Taking as its departure point a sense of ‘negative capability’, privileging ideas of beauty over intellectual and philosophical certainty, 'The Darkroom (for Callisto)' offers a retelling of the ancient myth of the Cosmic Hunt, sometimes called ‘the oldest story in the world’. Drawing on techniques of lyric poetry and ekphrasis, 'The Darkroom' is informed by aural traditions of the folktale and ghost story, alongside works by Laurie Anderson, Janet Cardiff, Anne Carson, Marianne Faithfull, Jenny Hval and others. 
 
Story by Alex and Dan Rhys Wakefield 
Set to music by Greg Parker 
With the voices of Michelle Hussey, Jannis Bohling, Denis Franz, Paul Norris, Patrick Schäfer, and Alex and Dan Rhys Wakefield 
 
Additional audio by Alex and Dan Rhys Wakefield 
Cover image by Alex and Dan Rhys Wakefield 
 
With thanks to Colette Sheddick, Jamie Lee, Annie Milward

The Darkroom (for Callisto)

This much I know to be true 
 
There is an arrow in my brain. An arrow has fallen in the eye of the afternoon. Against the 
brightness of the sun my vision turns to a web of hot milk. Tearful, steaming on heatless metal and 
in the sky, the clouds, the images I have slept too long among are calling songs from two worlds. 
Arcas, most beautiful doctor! I have been too hasty, dizzying myself with so much Life! 
 
* * * 
 
Some place no longer here there is a mountain from which I, exhausted, now journey home. My 
mind skips over the doctor’s advice: 
Three days without pictures, without poetry and without music, and in the nights only 
songs from childhood. Anything less risks overturning our work. 
So far O.K. The mountain was so full of life, of colour; of story and song and baskets and bread. 
All behind me now. My only travel companion my radio, which picks up language in dribs and 
drabs as I go. Together we stretch our ears over the horizon— 
Perilous white milk on marble floor 
Conceals object worth my constancy 
My doors dark and hiding . . . oncoming . . . approaching 
 
Sag mir wo die Blümen sind! 
Somewhere a wire is too cross. The air is up high. I feel the afternoon is out of tuning. . . 
something over my shoulder threatens to empty the world of its charges. Hmmm. 
I walk on, hoping to gain ground on whatever hangs behind. The light is fast fading. 
 
* * * 
 
Soon I am in luck! Up ahead, where the day is running scarce, I spy a small, dark room – 
somewhere I might hide away from whatever storm charges in the distance. 
I step inside, and all at once the light is generally gone, disappeared into some big hat. 
 
I wait as my eyes catch up with the sudden dark. All too noisy. . . 
Arcas. . . ? 
—Patient! 
 
In my mind’s eye I try to conjure familiar shapes from the black: a bed, a hook on the wall for my 
coat and my radio. . . but No! All is dust, spilling through my eyes like milk. Big noisy ghost, me 
who stalks this room. 
 
Hello again, my deare it’s beene too longe! 
Do I receive you well? 
—Who is calling? 
The wind continues. Rattling the distance and whispering through my radio. A voice is singing but 
I cannot make out the words. Flimflam asterisms sounding out the day. . . 
Nothing is coming to me right. Is it the world or my receptors? 
My memory feels fuzzy, like a throat. I must sleep. This is too much. Too quickly. Sense will surely 
return in daylight. 
 
Don't wanna set the world on fire 
Love you too much baby 
 
I am awake but the dark is still total. 
 
Just wanna light a flame in yr heart 
Or not total. Up on the wall, above the foot of the bed: a speck of light plain as a pin. Reaming 
through a crack in the masonry, dart-white arrow fixing my eye. 
Daylight? No, still, brighter than any distant star. The morning birds are silent. 
 
* 
 
I blincke the sleep away and the light smudges across the room. Like steam on a mirror I wait for 
the traces to disappear but they hold on. This is no dust. Perhaps some roaming constellation, 
transposed, weary under the pull of the Earth. . . 
O to have a friend so brave 
So very Heaven! 
The radio up to its tritcherie. Hmmmm. . . 
 
The darkness disappears, receding like it could never have held out. . . but What is taking its 
place? 
You There—! 
 
The world expects me. Outside a table is set for two. 
The glass shall clinke, We will feaste and drinke— 
 
Soon the world will be turned upside down. 
 
* 
 
Extending a seat at this table to you is all that is stable in this darkness. 
 
Another world unpacks itself around me. When did I switch my bags with You, ghost who stalks 
this room? Why me the object of your espying? 
Here, inside, clouds of darkness obscure your origin. Who (what?) is to say what might be found 
on the other side of these walls? And every crack, every seame in every stone a face waiting to be 
found, water arcing to meet itself. . . 
Another song from childhood: 
 
When the sky is open / and birds begin to ring / across Heaven's unquiet bell. . . 
—The morning birds are silent. 
 
Under cover of night I sink deeper under the water, shucking up silt and clay. Every movement 
obscuring my vision. Every image turned to mud. I cannot see beyond my own eyes: a heavy 
ghost inside a pinhole. 
Infinite possibility though movement restricted 
Up above (downbelow) the speaking of cafés so formal with their hospitalitie, waiting like a 
chessboard. And all that is stable [is table] in this darkeness, extending a seat to You: infinite 
possibility – movement restricted. 
I hear you when I am still, hiding in the fullnesse of life where there is no room for sound, for 
breathing. . . 
The morning birds are silent. 
I hear you in the purdah, the chatter in my radio. Ours is the only song beyond these monopolies 
on comfort. 
 
You! Whose mouth receives such splendid proclamations, born one side of the thin veil screening 
this space from mine, what else grows in the fertile earth between ceiling and floor? 
 
And, all at once, the radio speaks to me, louder than I have ever heard it before: 
LAY A RUG UPON THE FLOOR AND SET IT ON FIRE ! 
And just as suddenly, the floor is. . . lava?! 
AND I CREEP JUST AS SLOWLY UPON IT, EACH TIME WHISPERING— 
 
Ow 
—UNTIL THE RUG IS TURNED TO BLACK ASH AND MY EVERY STEPPE PLANTS VOID 
INTO THE EARTH, THAT BETWEEN FOUR AND TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW WILL BLOSSOM 
INTO POCKETS IN THE MATRIX AND REPLACE THE GROUND WITH THEIR EMPTINESS 
 
You There! Intransient chorister, eckoing my Love into the wide open day. Your Voice tying knots 
between my suspicions, pulling me up by my eardrums! 
I, ACQUIRING LANGUAGE IN DRIBS AND DRABS AS IT COMES TO ME THRU THE 
FIRMAMENT, MY TONGUE SHAPING VOWELS THE AGE OF STARS, CHARTING A COURSE 
THRU ANCIENT INFLEXIONS, BRUSHING UP AGAINST THE WORDS OF GODS, SUNG ON 
SUCH UNSPEAKABLE FREQUENCIES. . . 
 
STONE SKIPPING ACROSS THE POOL OF MY OBSCURITY, THE SURFACE IS GONE, 
THE FILM DISTURBED, ONCE SPILLED NEVER RECOVERED, I AM WATER IN YER CORNERS 
 
NO LARGE TIME I AM WATCHING. I WATCH THE TREES STRETCHING, FROM THE 
WATER O ! DO THEY NOT SKIP QUICKLY? THIS MUCH BY MY I – BY MY EYE SPY – KNOW TO 
BE TRUE 
 
AND YOU THERE UNEARTHED MY CALLING, JOY ! IN MY ECKOINGED ARC—AS PLAIN 
AS SONG YOUR SUNNE IS MARBLE BLACK. . . I WAS TOO FULLE OF LIFE, O MATRIX ME! 
TOO PLAIN IN THE WATER, SOON COSMICK HUNTING. . . 
 
HIS BIG TRICKS MY UNRAVELLING! SHADY BENEATH THEIR MOUNTAIN, ARCTIC IN 
THE TREES I AWAIT HIS ARROW AND NOW IN THE DARK OF YOUR CHAMBER— CAMERA, 
DRINKING MY STARLITE PLAIN AS A PIN THRU THE BLACK, REAMING IN VERSE. . . 
 
WALK TO YOUR EVERYE CORNER I AM ECKOING, ME AND MY HUNTING SOME 
QUARTER FOUND, ASTERING SKY DOGS MAKE THEIR RETURN TO THE QUIRE. . . 
EVERYTHING ONE DAY UPSIDE DOWNE ! 
 
* * * 
 
[CRASH] 
—goes the hole in the wall, enlarged and bored by the wind. 
But some image remains, so easily touched. Through the widened hole light streams drunk, or 
sucked in by a straw. And the image it casts is. . . sharp? obscure? A liquid? 
 
Held constant on the clouds outside, balanced on a film, wicking off to be peeled by impatient 
fingers; the sticker on an orange peel. 
Water marble steady in the breeze 
This storm untroubling constant sea [constancy] 
An eye, a marble. . . so perfect 
Taut on a magician's string 
—Sing a song to sleep by 
This room is now as a vacuum, waiting to be emptied of. . . me?! Certainly I am pulled to its 
edges, 
O! I of mine 
O! window, o! empty camera. . . 
Place yourself up against the glass between that world and this 
 
No argument. I press my eye in close to the pinhole. . . 
 
Beyond the gushing water clouds. . . Unmistakeable as memory in aspic, in cellophane; caught in 
a net; ensnared behind dust in the water: 
 
The wind is up. And the living. The sky yawns distant overheard. 
Tell me where the flowers are! 
 
I set my eye on your arrival, on else where the light is general and colossal machines dig holes in 
all recorded history. . . 
I am nine years old and the sun is shining behind the big house. 
(The light hits me square in the eye like mud, like a greeting.) 
 
We sit on the bank drinking bottled water. Nearby, children scream with delight at an old 
man waving giant bubbles from a bucket and an old rope. 
(The storm cracks once! twice! again!) 
 
'Here', I point to the horizon and draw a circle around joy. 
This much I know to be true. I feel it in my every step, heavy with the life of me. Too full of myself, 
of the world. . . And constant over the horizon radars set their ears, my fingers reaming cloudy 
through the tapestries of your language and in the ridges of my thumbs I carry the weight of you. 
But no! I peel off the sticker and eat you whole. 
Soon shall spill the meaning. O boy ! soon the cup shall overfloweth. The wine pot shall clinke, we 
will feaste and drinke. And then strange notions will abound! 
Enter radio 
 
You have jumped into the idle pool of my retina. You swim with abandon, kicking up spray and 
rearranging the— 
Exit roof 
—Hello? 
 
The roof is up on the wind: so many arrows across the sky, a whole volley! 
And the walls? Surely soon they must follow. . . There is not much time. 
 
You There! Too long I have played host to your wandering. What business have you in this house, 
or I? On some calendar long erased you marked a scrawl across this day. And here you return, 
proud in your punctuality, pulling me up, up, until I can no longer see the edges of sense and I 
implore you. . . elusive poet-aster, reveal yourself! 
Exit bedsheets 
 
I have built my home upon the earth and I am digging in its garden. Mired in the muck. . . mud in 
my eye! 
Exit bedframe 
 
All noble diggers arrived at the surface, now stood up. Here we go: 
I take my leave of all this noise! Once companion now too much. . . 
Turn away violin, turn away flute, turn away quire of voices saying O! Your music gives me only 
alarum. I find your airs of solidity produce in me only a lack of some thing I will never find. 
Exit radio 
 
And walls too, will you follow? 
Exit walls 
 
O! voice, o! callistine arbiter, how reckless you are with your freedoms. You pull and you pull at the 
hem of my constancy and I find it now unravelled. I am naked. I have floated too far from the 
vestry of your company and exposed, cælestial, I rattle against the dizzy dazzle of the day. 
And how it dazzles! Walls beyond walls await, storm-born dust, cloud, air circling. . . And no more 
diggers to build them! 
Arcas, thank you: my hot-milk vision now unclouded; my dream-companion images in the clouds, 
calling songs from this world to the next. 
This new film around me retreats like steam on a mirror, the surface flat and still, the image always 
there revealing itself. . . Ha! 
The wall in the water: the island, the raft; mountain emerged from the deep, all now standing. Go! 
Go! I listen and I go, my only luggage the word. 
 
Exit narrator

The isbell's soup factory is seen today (2021) and in three different future scenarios (2121): 
 
1. 2021 – commercial of Isbell's soup today 
2. 2121(a) – commercial in the era of pictograms when there is no written language anymore 
3. 2021 – commercial of Isbell's soup today 
4. 2121(b) – commercial in a time after industry, when no brands or factories exist 
5. 2021 – commercial of Isbell's soup today 
6. 2121(c) – commercial in the reign of chicken which run the factory and process corpses for sustainability reasons.

Isbell's soup

Featuring physical theatre and spoken text, this short film poem asks: How do we act and make decisions in the context of interdependence and contingency? How does a person carve out a meaningful life beyond the hero’s journey? After progress, is anything sacred? 
 
Made as an international collaboration across Vancouver and Edinburgh, "Hierophant" features three characters and their quests for meaning. Through fragments of poetic dialogue, “case studies”, diary entries, and inner monologues spoken aloud, the characters reveal themselves and their life philosophies. One character, “Y”, is an action-oriented individualist, who embodies the classical rational agent progressing linearly towards a goal. The second character, “Miloš”, is aware of his interdependence with others but stuck in despair, swallowed up by his grief for ecological and human suffering. The narrator is at turns both individuals, as she alternates between the dichotomous poles of having a certain kind of purpose and despair at her failure to achieve it.

Hierophant

This audio work presents two parallel narratives describing the capture of bison from Southern Kansas and Northern Texas. This piece brings together prose drawn from the many biographies and autobiographies surrounding Charles "Buffalo" Jones. They take on two very different narrative voices and registers — Fight or Flight is told from the perspective of a bison cow being pursued by Jones. It is immediate and attempts to position the reader in the sensorial perception of a bison. Buffalo Jones is a first-person interrogation of the legacy myth of Buffalo Jones. Through these texts, I enact feminist, new materialist, and decolonial theory. Together these rich narrative soundscapes tell a single story from two perspectives; one human and one more-than-human. This experimental story-telling attempts to decenter the written text as the exclusive site of authority and rigour.

Flight or Fight & Buffalo Jones

”No strings attached? Finding new ways of communicating” is a multimedia reflection on bodily movement after progress based on poetry, science, and dance. Speaking different languages and trying to understand each other, bodies and voices ask what acceleration/slowing down of a body is and how movement relates to time and space. If there is no linearity, no final goal that bodies move towards, what function does movement have in our lives and in our relations to each other and the world? ”No strings attached?“ shows the struggle of being stuck. It shows the impossibility to move forward, as well as the impossibility to stay. All living beings share this one planet in which “we” can feel so detached at times. We, after progress, are in need of speaking and thinking in non-linear ways. There is no acceleration without slowing down.

No strings attached? Finding new ways of communicating

LOVEBOT is a psychologist chatbot, an artificial intelligence trained for psychology therapy. The video shows a possible patient-bot interaction based on algorithms specialized in personal storytelling. The artwork reflects on the potential and limits of human-machine interaction, taking its cue from one of the most human relationships, that between therapist and patient. What value does this have in the absence of empathy, sympathy, proxemics and physicality? At a time when most therapies have been moved to online platforms, what happens if we go further? What limits and advantages can such a formulated therapy have? What transformation do concepts such as trust, shyness, privacy have? The work reflects on these issues through the dehumanization of an extremely humanized practice.

LOVEBOT

Totem is an amalgamation of works that have been produced in response to Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story The Preserving Machine. In K. Dick’s text, set in a society of the near future ravished by ecological disaster and war, a scientist called Doc Labyrinth becomes worried about the decline of humanity. He seeks for a way of safe guarding what he sees to be the most important cultural artefacts of human achievement; music. However, the process becomes complicated where these organic embodiments, re-entered into the machine become “distorted, diabolical, without sense or meaning.” 
 
Here, the virtual sculpture uses the framework of one form of compiling visual language – the exquisite corpse – to explore the language of computer-generated imagery and its relationship to translation. The surface of the of the object mimics chrome or mercury as a visual reference to the reflective metal-ness used in the pioneering CGI of dystopian sci fi films Terminator 2. Sculptures from the group are fused together to form a Tower of Babel of mis-translation; a kind of Frankenstein’s monster as an approximate translation of a cohesive object within a Romanticised landscape.

Totem

A reckoning between choreographer and fossil in The Botanischer Garten der Technischen Universität Dresden, Petrified Unrest sites the human breath in the temporality of a mineralised Sequoia tree. As the breath encounters the deep time of the fossil, the 33 million year old Braunkohlquarzit, Susswaterquarzit, and Knollenstein resists an invitation to ‘hold fast to the ruins’ and enters a process of perpetual becoming inside and outside thought. Performed through more-than-representational movement, film, spoken word and text, the breath and Sequoia exceed a metaphysical world-in-themselves to elude progress, the ‘constant disquiet that knows no development’ (Baudelaire-Benjamin) 
 
The story is about inter species folding, one that speaks from the ruins of progress for a flourishing in ornate and restrained form. It is the sound of a breathing that slows movement down and works against progress. It reads like a Baroque dance, as a supremely natural movement notated in a measured style of thought: 'sprezzatura'. A collaboration between text and movement it incites ontological possibilities that invert the aspiration of progress into the seething and the teeming…

Petrified Unrest

The infinite concatenations, entanglements, connections of matter, dead and alive, plants, animals, pollutants, objects. The infinite interweaving of the times past, present, future. Not linear but in cycles, connections as an open loop. The collage explores possibilities of narrating relations of fish, pollutants, organs, and others through stacking, arranging, overlapping, and repeating layers across times and spaces. More-than-human life and death, suffering and thriving in the midst of what is now a permanently polluted world. This is where we situate our story; where different more-than-human beings coexist in pollution and persist despite their vulnerabilities and violence. The project is loosely based on ethnographic research on more-than-human intimacy in the scientific making of knowledge on pollutants, which persist and accumulate in living beings. The fish, the liver, and the pollutants are all part of the setting, present and entangled. Our story gives them shapes and voices, relates them through images, text, and sound. It makes them dance. In the style of comic book drawings or children's book illustrations, our story is a lighthearted exploration of life under water, persistent in itself, persevering as it finds joy and pleasure where one could see mere darkness.

Pleasures of Survival

In this work, a sudden climatic change brings a group of migrants that face survival in Europe to live in subterranean environments. In the underground, they learn essential living lessons from soils, and a multitude of earth beings, and they pay attention to the survival skills of roots and the routines and cycles of other species. Impacted by desaceleration they learn to enjoy the vibrancy of stillness. And they plant histories with others that counter the excess of light, of speed and of production through chaos, persistence and chance. 
 
This story is woven around the notion that we are set to enter into deeper crises and thus we could be anytime thrown into utterly unknown conditions, such that our sense of self and of reality would no longer be recognizable to us or would mean the wreckage of our species. Having grown up in Peru in the 80s, in the absence of basic covered needs, and in the dark of frequent blackouts, we dug on these lived memories to extrapolate the learnings that generation made then. The story hints to how a disconnection from productivity and efficacy, creates an opportunity for trans-species ancestral knowledges to come to the fore. As a chance to introduce ourselves to the rhythm of other songs beyond accumulation and progress.

Stories of Endarkment

The genus Salix is a species originating from Asia and found globally in contrasting environments from temperate waterscapes to arid landscapes. In the UK, its presence is carefully utilised and for hundreds of years has been seen as central to the ecology and culture of distinct watery landscapes. Conversely, in Australia it is perceived as a species that is invasive and detrimental to the Australian continent’s fragile and diverse ecosystems, ranging from alpine, to tropical to desert climates. It seems the non-human willow is inviting us to take a closer look at our human perceptions of the environmental world, the significance of water and the metaphor of species wanderings. 
 
We explore ideas of water and wanderings through collaborative practices of weaving in which the weaving process and the woven piece are the story. Here,the personality of willow guides the narrative – its history, behaviour and translocative interactions within larger ecosystems. With one participant based in the UK and two other participants in Australia, our process is in itself a woven interplay that embraces the materiality of the willow. Here, weaving is a metaphor and means of transcontextual, sensorial exchange in which we explore the story of the willow from our local areas to address attitudes and perceptions of identity, place and (after) progress. 
 
While Salix is seen as a benevolent species, supporting a healthy ecosystem in one locale, it tells a story of invasion, decay and impact in another. These willow bound littoral zones will be explored and reimagined beyond conventional models of sustainability and/or rejuvenation to explore notions of ecological balance and diversity where the human and more than human can once again coexist in harmony.

Words from the Willow

“Transmutation of Decay” enacts themes surrounding “nature” after progress, including the decay, collapse, and transformation of landscapes and bodies with emphasis on healing and balance in keeping with ideas of transmutation in witchcraft and magic. Transmutation and phantasmagoria act as models for future(s)-thinking and a way of affirming life by emphasizing “rewilding” for the landscapes we inhabit and that inhabit us. According to George Monbiot, “rewilding” is “resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way” - Dolly Jørgensen goes further to illustrate that rewilding has become a term and idea with quite a bit of conceptual mobility, used widely by activists and anarchists to suggest ferality, or letting the landscape do what it will. Rewilding the landscape acts as a metaphor for rewilding the self; and in this sense, our short film casts a spell (so to speak) through montage and soundtrack, activating decay and entropy as potentials for resurgence in death/life cycles. With a focus on phantasmagoria and landscapes, our short film dramatizes the exploitation inherent in and after late-capitalism while providing space to conceive of flourishing life beyond it.

The Transmutation of Decay

Progress has ended. 
 
The morning after the night before. 
 
This short film hopes to enable your navigation of a post progress world. It starts with the body. Start by sitting down is not about you following along as you watch - although you may do this -  it is an invitation that outlasts the duration of the film. An invitation into softness, joy, some kind of collectivity and being at home in your body.  
 
 
This film is intended to be viewed with headphones.

Start by sitting down

'We are the granddaughters of those who didn't burn' (Haraway, 2017), is a visual poem or prayer to the ancestors. It is a calling to them, specifically to the Celtic Cailleach asking for her support and guidance at this time of need. The myth of The Cailleach comes from a culmination of written and oral accounts about the Celtic wise woman and/or crone. She is a dynamic force and a continuing presence in Irish and Scottish culture. The Cailleach exemplifies the psychodynamic process of change and transformation and symbolises a feminist reframing of Irish culture, a reclaiming of the demonised otherworld female of Irish tradition. The title: 'We are the granddaughters of those who didn't burn,' is a phrase from a presentation by Donna Haraway at Yale University on October 23rd, 2017. Opportunistic, contingent, The Cailleach is worlding through myth, through feminist principles, and through the extraordinary. 
 
Making is a recycling of found imagery. It is a cut-up, which Simon O’Sullivan calls doing violence to, to create something new, something different, (2017). It is a reusing of footage, in this instance bringing it forward from the past to create a future fictioning (Burrows, O’Sullivan, 2019).

We are the granddaughters of those who didn't burn

To the Marrow of the Beast: Morphology of a Cuban River is, at the same time, an artistic project and a creative writing experiment. The project is led by the artist collective La Médula de Cuba to save, through art, the most important and polluted river of the province of Guantánamo, Cuba. As a group composed of dancers, choreographers, photographers, musicians, and video-artists, La Médula is interested in raising ecological awareness through embodied aesthetic forms. The ongoing project is composed of choreographed bodies captured on camera along the river, as well as original music and videos. As researchers, Alexandrine and Eleonora are interested in experimenting with collective creative forms of writing, including audio-visual and embodied storytelling, that engage with an affective approach to knowing versus a more traditional descriptive understanding of knowledge production. 
 
This written and audio-visual collective story aims to imagine the Guaso river after-progress in a non-Western non-capitalist context. In an imaginative move through art we ask: what might be the possible future of the Guaso river in Guantánamo? What kind of politics and aesthetics does it require to rethink humans’ relationship with the river in non-progressive and more-than-human terms?

To the Marrow of the Beast: Morphology of a Cuban River

Different reports, predictions and speculations often tell us about a future that seems to be exhausted. In this project, we have engaged in the specific prediction of a thin future, concerning the loss of pollinators (IPBES 2019) and along with that how many ecosystem services and more that we take for granted today are radically affected. 
 
Knowledge and facts in reports and scientific papers are of utter need and importance, but might be hard to access and grasp in everyday life. In an attempt to move beyond and enrich polarized responses of game-over or techno-fixes potentially inflicted by such factful stories, we have created a series of graphical visualisations that attempt to tell thick and complex stories of plant-pollinator-relationships at stake. Through crossing poetic forms of comics, detailed biological information and important natureculture relationships the posters display red clover, strawberries, almonds. How these strips connect or narrate as one whole, or form a more wordy and worldly story is not given - they can be read in many different ways. More particularly, they weave narratives with present and absent plants, insects, humans and tools for pollination together with past, present and potential future.

Un/making Pollination

‘The great conversation (still as someone passes by)’ is a collaborative audio-visual story by Marleen Boschen, Lou-Atessa Marcellin, Charles Pryor and Sara Rodrigues. It follows the soil as a narrator of and witness to the unfolding histories of human cultivation practices and acts of environmental violence. The piece makes audible a living global infrastructure, a carrier for past and present cultivation knowledges. It asks how an ‘earthbound’ story can be told through something we often unknowingly depend on for the survival of human and non-human ecologies alike. 
 
The story integrates a range of human and nonhuman voices, field recordings as well as sound compositions by Sara Rodrigues to tell a polyphonic and layered story of human-soil relations, expectations and imaginaries. It focuses on evoking different affective states and changes its emotive charge throughout, managing to bring to the listeners different modes of relating, understanding and feeling. The sounds are taken from both familiar settings (like the soft touch of humid soil or footsteps on foliage) creating a direct connection to personal embodied memories of such, but also from unfamiliar noises like the perpetuating mechanical sound of a seed bank.

The great conversation (still as someone passes by)

Listen 
soil is 
I was 
formed over a long period of time 
It is hard to give you a sense of just how long 
how much I’ve felt 
how my body has aged and renewed itself 
deposited and been inscribed 
Been eroded and extracted from 
And I am not really 
an I 
am multiple 
living and dying layer of organisms 
debris 
Minerals 
I’m made of digestion 
 
And you want so many things from me 
 
I need to take you through this story 
it’ll be rushed 
there’s sadness in it 
and I’ll probably get angry towards the end 
But first things first 
We’re in this together 
yes I can still grow things for you 
that’s what you want isn’t it? 
be patient 
listen 
 
Supporting those seeds 
that improved life that 
you’re so eager to see being productive 
takes time 
 
My parents are pulverised rocks 
carried by wind 
water 
I am so much more 
than a medium for vegetal life 
I hold and withhold water 
I am home 
to more life than you can imagine 
Living bodies 
dead bodies 
future bodies 
 
Long ago 
you found out about the things I hold in me 
the extractors arrived 
mining into me 
out of me 
Leavings toxins 
Oil 
Coal 
Gas 
all these sources of energy that were so precious to you 
I buried them deep 
in mountains 
under the ocean 
in deserts 
They are forests too you know? 
Ancient and compressed 
sheltering the carbon 
they used to hold as photosynthetic beings 
 
There was a time 
when only plants covered the land 
silent and serene 
calm and sad 
You want that fire they promise 
You’ve almost taken it all 
 
You know I can die too 
right? 
Slowly wither away 
turn to dust 
join the wind 
The more you want 
the more you need to care for me 
I won’t always be there 
 
[sound interlude] 
 
II 
 
I have witnessed the human cultivators 
- the heavy weight of their settlements 
 
I have been drained 
irrigated 
and ploughed 
 
I hold the earliest traces of past civilisations 
layers of carbon bare witness 
to extraction of minerals 
microbes 
and critters 
 
I have observed the transgression of marine life 
into areas that now lay arid and lifeless 
I have felt the ‘waters of the Persian Gulf 
lapping at the door of Ur in ancient Mesopotamia’ 
I recall the broadcasting of seed grains as the sea retreated 
 
I am alluvium 
I am nutrient-rich 
and my sediment gathers 
pools and decays 
 
I recall my mineral composition 
- once the foundation of this slowly dried out sea 
I was the foundation for the wild herbivores 
and the grazing land for human companions 
 
I am marshland 
raised ground 
a refuge for the settlers 
 
I am turtleback 
a trophic cascade of resources, 
extracted 
and exploited for my life giving properties 
I am the giver of protein 
I am bulrush 
water lily 
and molluscs 
I am part mammal 
part gazelle 
I am fish 
crustaceans 
I am human 
 
I was once a riverbed 
teaming with nutrients 
dead and alive 
I am alchemy and cosmology 
 
I was once resilient 
abundant 
and firm 
a hunting ground for game and edible plants 
I transgress borders and boundaries 
I am weightless 
moved by wind and the sea 
I am riparian and hydrophilic 
 
I was the conjunction of several ecosystems 
I provided resilience and diversity 
for human and non-human life worlds 
 
I have witnessed the mass migration of gazelle 
the channelling of herds to the slaughterhouse of humans 
 
The human hunters were overseen by the rhythms of my companions 
the migrational patterns of sediments 
reptile 
mammal 
and bird 
 
I am a part of the tempo that once governed the human hunters 
 
[sound interlude] 
 
III 
 
There was a time when certain humans 
under the flags of expansion and colonisation 
claimed to discover huge sways of 
the biodiversity I had nurtured for millennia 
the people who lived in those areas 
had nurtured for millennia 
 
They were amazed at this accomplishment 
which they thought was theirs 
 
Those botanists were agents of empire 
plants their tools 
They scavenged in silence 
 methodically 
introducing their systems of naming 
and taming 
Domesticating plants, 
improving them, 
turning them productive 
 
Transplanting 
 
You had such finite ideas of progress and productivity 
You didn’t see 
how quickly they started to exhaust me 
How violently they eradicated those people 
who had worked with me 
learned from me 
believed in a different way 
of being-with 
 
You were extractors of a different kind 
not coal and oil and gas but living things, 
returned them to your home lands 
 
in the names of science and research 
 
You didn’t trust the wilderness of those forests 
it scared you 
life was deadly here 
Dense, and hard to move 
yet so much value 
 
What you called nature 
was to be a product, 
you thought about resources, 
one day you would call them 
ecosystem services and green capital 
At the same time 
so many continued to live differently 
I still don’t understand 
why this one way of being and planting and mining was so dominant, 
how it slowly destroyed all my other collaborations 
How it was so successful 
 
at removing life and 
turning it into barely living 
 
[sound interlude] 
 
IV 
 
I say ‘I’, nevertheless I mean ‘We’ 
although ‘We’ have and continue to decline 
an acceleration of sorts 
of loss 
of forgetting 
 
The great mechanisation of life worlds 
reduced to algorithms and biometrics 
you see little is understood of our natural cycles 
our patterns of decomposition 
our companionships 
the soil food web 
The Great Conversation 
between 
organic matter 
nematodes 
fungi 
bacteria 
protozoa 
arthropods 
birds 
animals 
 
In seven human decades we have become 
germplasm 
genetic code 
computable and colonised 
reduced to data 
invisibly governed 
hybridised and mutated 
singled out – banked 
a service 
 
In the name of development 
our primitive cultivators stripped bare 
our terrestrial counterparts trapped in the belly of this machine 
churning industrialised 
bred and manipulated 
 
I have observed my wild relatives perish and return 
dwarfed into new forms 
superior forms 
high yielding forms 
simplified forms 
able to withstand a higher dosage 
of nitrogen phosphorous 
Of herbicides pesticides 
potion and poison. 
 
I am the silent spring. 
the mute landscape 
still 
and 
subdued 
 
I am a vessel for hybridity 
the corn 
the wheat 
the ‘miracle’ rice 
miracle seed 
tall and robust 
hardy but thirsty 
impressively uniform 
vulnerable and blight 
 
You can find my past extracted and stored 
My resilient bygone 
frozen between the others 
my indigenous, ingenious friends 
 
I could tell you stories 
Stories of now banked knowledge 
Stories of cooperation 
Kinship 
 
I haven’t forgotten 
I am still 
waiting 
knowing 
I hold traces of a heterogeneous past 
indigenous land races 
togetherness 
mutual dependency 
 
I am mono 
cultured 
homogenised 
fit to feed the belly of this machine 
emptied and disposed 
spoken of as dirt 
inert – substance 
drip fed 
ploughed 
eroded 
I am acidified 
Mutated 
ICU’ed 
 
A witness to an invasion 
still as a someone passes by 
an attack on biological evolution 
as the vampire draws its teeth 
governed and classified. 
 
[sound interlude] 
 
V 
We have arrived 
at this moment now 
you have been trapped for a while 
unable to move for months 
 
Maybe you’ve been practicing to listen differently 
Maybe you’ve had time to reflect on how you relate to the world 
 
For some, observing the cyclical patterns of plants growing 
of spring arriving despite of it all 
 
of trees heavy with blossom 
was helpful in this isolation 
 
How fast vegetal life can engulf, 
wrap 
strangle 
Expand 
 
Of seeing how time isn’t linear 
Leaves and branches continued 
We are still moving while you are not 
Our pace is gentle 
and in silence 
unstoppable 
 
How do we go deeper from here? 
 
For us 
My bacteria 
Floats 
Swells 
You inhale 
I emit 
 
And I am more than just carbon 
I am rich 
You are poor 
 
My resources tell stories 
Histories of coming togetherness 
Histories of mutuality 
Death, decay and rebirth 
 
Without me you are 
Particle, dust and ash 
You are gas 
Aerosols, carbon dioxide, methane, phosphorus and nitrogen 
 
You are 
Novel entities 
Toxic waste, synthetic compounds, 
 
You talk of progress 
Of re-greening 
A net-zero future 
A future of electricity: wind farms, solar farms, waveforms, soy farms. 
[smart] farms 
A landscape wrapped in metal and tech 
A meticulously monitored monoculture 
 
This won’t save us. 
 
Perhaps it is this time, of silence, of reflection 
Of slowing down 
That you now know something has been forgotten… 
A forgotten potential 
Of kinship 
Vegetal awakening 
 
Like the common poppy 
A single seed that can lie dormant for eighty years 
Silently waiting inside of me 
Waiting for its time of reemergence 
A silent witness to this machine 
An opportunist 
Anticipating an opening 
A cavity or crack to rupture in the concrete 
To blossom and breath 
To reconnect and find companionship. 
 
I want you 
To slow down 
Open your window 
and listen to the great conversation 
 
You are a part of me as much as I am a part of you. 
 
Silence.

As we stare at ourselves on Zoom or edit our bodies online to make them more palatable to our own eyes, technology has become a space of the self. And now that so much of our social interaction occurs through a screen, this particularly-difficult facet of our online existence is almost inescapable. Mirror fitness equipment and fitness technology that claims to “see” the user invite the ultimate vulnerability: watching one’s “undesirable” body next to its white, toned, sleek “potential.” 
 
Simultaneously, the draw of unplugging, of going off the grid, feels more urgent than ever. In the pandemic’s social isolation, the cyborgian body becomes all the more present — its violences, its cultivation of possibility, its cravings for connection. 
 
The stock market, on the otherhand, is one of the least embodied objects in the world. It is a construction created by a self-serving industry, albeit with very real consequences. This story is about the quest for control, the replacement of one avenue of capitalist reward for another, and the hope of a future grounded in environmental, interpersonal, and embodied awareness. 
 
Mirror was first published in 'you are here: the journal of creative geography' at the University of Arizona in May 2021.

Mirror

ACSE (Allium Cepa Stella Erratica / onion planet) was a speculative laboratory constructed and operated in an art gallery to enable experiments for new planet development through onion propagation. ACSE incorporated bio-art, durational performance, installation, and social engagement. 
 
Experiments in Biological Planet Formation will outline the objectives, functions, and public experience of the ACSE laboratory, while also revealing the speculative nature of the laboratory and its purpose. Experiments in Biological Planet Formation ponders the possibility of nurturing onions into a planet for human colonization as a predictive reality to generate dialogue about the collective social and environmental experience of the now. 
 
ACSE utilized labor as both a performance and a process for understanding and creation. Through the enaction of care and tenderness in a hybrid laboratory/art gallery setting, a productive interspecies collaboration was yielded. 
 
The durational performances of experiments conflated common perceptions of laboratory, kitchen, and art studio. Thus, the experimental methods employed blurred lines between cooking, dissection, and object making, not to challenge the value or efficacy of science, art, or domesticity, only to broaden their perceived possibilities. Experiments in Biological Planet Formation works as speculative fiction in real time to engage audiences in difficult political realities.