Empowering Oppositions to the ANTHRØ-Krapitalism Catastrophes-continuum !
Encounters with Grounded Radical Futurism
Yesterday we were on our way to Pro-QM bookshop in Mitte to pick up some things for research, but were 10 minutes too late. Closed ! Scheiße! But an incredible synchronicity, we caught the announcement on an *analog* flyer in the window for a book launch with TJ Demos ( director of Center for Creative Ecologies at UC Santa Cruz ) for his latest Radical Futurism - Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come ( TJD on Sternberg Press ) at the NBK ( Artothek – Neuer Berliner Kunstverein ). Also 10 min. late for that, and another 10 min. away by bike, so we dashed over. It was spot-on for feeding our activism engines !
Image: from Anthropocene: The Human Epoch - documentary, 2019
{ Btw, this was NOT in our latest XLT Radar calendar listings, unfortunately; And we would just like to remind people here that we are attempting to build some kind of collective hive-mind for alerting each other about critical stuff we should know about in our local Btropolis ( primarily, but also things happening anywhere ). ! This includes a broad spektrum, and not just the community organizing, political events, arts+praxis, films, musika, etc… Whatever can inspire + motivate us ! After last night’s talk, we will also start to describe this as: Whatever can pull us together on this path towards the new “radical futurism” ! So please feel free to alert us, and ADD dates and events in the comments of our Radar posts. AND please feel free to join the discussions ! Log-in required unfortunately. Or, if you are not a Substack subscriber, you can also send us an email and we will post it, if you wish.}
Image: Tar Sands in Alberta, Ca.
Image: Painting: The Anthropocene by Philip Govedare
We’ll share here one of the back-cover quotes, from Yates McKee, author of Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition, which gives a great intro to where Demos’ and his fresh counterpunch-packing book wants to take us :
“ With careful attention to the forms, details and intellectual frameworks of activist cultural production at multiple geographical scales, Demos shows that a “ future that holds many futures” is an already-emergent reality: people are confronting the catastrophic endgames of climate barbarism not only with acts of dissent and protest, but with regenerative infrastructures of assembly, relation, cooperation, and care that embody in their practice a mutliplicity of revolutionary temporalities. “
Sounds academic, and it is… but not only ! This is very intertwined with active + frontline engagements ! And it contains multiple worlds … i.e. of the Zapatistas ( as you might already recognize from the remixed desires in the quote above about multiple futures : The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit! )… and of Red Nations, Black Quantum Futurism, La Colectiva Feminista, The Otilith Group, Fridays For Future + Ext. Rebellion, Debt Collective, Homebaked Community Land Trust, Strike MOMA… and many many more !
One of the collective groups ( and movements ) covered in the book is the extraordinary output of BQF, which first introduced us to thinking about the importance of a Chronopolitics, and decolonizing time. One only has to think about our daily subjugation to predatory real-estate markets. land + property ownnership, and the rapidly rising rents in the cities ( and peripheries ) that keeps so many of us on the Krapitalist Clock !
We only have the book in our hands now for a couple days, so we’ll have to come back for a Part 2 and some deeper XLt analysis.
work-in-progress
… to be cont…