Can coming together to ‘practice’ or verbalise future narratives be a way to bring new alternatives to bear? Invited speakers were asked to prepare a 3-5 minute piece of speculative fiction considering potential futures.
The idea for the event came out of a recognition of a pattern of thinking we were seeing in ourselves and those around us - a fog of debilitating fatalism. The ubiquity of the end-of-the-world narratives that saturate our cultural dialogues have created a self confirming feedback loop that diminishes expectations and halts our capacity to imagine alternative futures.
But the future doesn’t have to be an endless extension of the mistakes of the now. We need to radicalise and reclaim our relationship to the future.
The title of the event is taken from a quote by author and activist Adrienne Marie Brown: “science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. I suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.”
The panel included landscape architects, architects, researchers, writers, poets and artists. The brief was intentionally left very open with the hope that in these speculative future depictions we will hear layering, converging and diverging, the beginning of many conversations and the understanding that we can move beyond this endless crisis loop into a world that contains many potential worlds.
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” - David Graeber
Practicing Futures Together took place during a Covid-19 lockdown. As a result the event was hosted via Zoom.
