Talking about the Future – a multi-layered narration about the possibilities and impossibility of the Future
by Silvia Amancei and Bogdan ArmanuCap. III
Politics of the Present
Two characters of a story. A young couple placed within a landscape that offers no specific landmarks, a place that could be here or there. It could be their familiar setting that they call home or it could be the other, the strange, the unknown. The action continues. It is at sunset and the weight of the end overwhelms the two. They seem exhausted, but not by the labour that have passed. History is not the one that has to be carried on their shoulders. Tomorrow is the great enemy. The idea of the future is the one that brings fear of the uncertain into the eyes of the couple. They are not overwhelmed by debt but by the idea of paying the debt, knowing that they are now obliged to work. What if they get ill? What if they get fired and lose their source of income? What it will happen with their lives?
There is no time to live the present when tomorrow brings nothing but uncertainty. There is no time to change the future because the time of tomorrow has been already sold.
There is no present. The action of the story was written years ago. Nonetheless we continue to live by its words. We trust its timeline and live together with the two characters and their drama of living into a complex multi-layered society. Although cruel, the bi-dimensional screen, the film, the story, offers comfort. Humans are organic machines and the complexity of life is impossible to grasp. At least not by their hands, eyes and minds. People are limited by their life experience and there is no time to experience the totality of life on Earth. Mortality is just one of the problems, but through administrative technics, one can facilitate the classification and translation of life.
“Ideological products produce new stratifications of reality; they are the intersection where human power, knowledge, and action meet. New modes of seeing and knowing demand new technologies, and new technologies demand new forms of seeing and knowing.” (Maurizio Lazzarato, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Pag-144, University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
Politics has the capacity of organizing the unknowns of the future, but more than that, it has the capacity to build a present, to put things in order and prepare them for the future. Politics has the potentiality of composing a collective body in situations when the real connection of people is impossible. Politics is a tool of translation, classification and composition of the human will, knowledge and potentiality. Politics can be a prosthesis for the wellbeing of everyone and everything. Unfortunately, after years of failures in the face of private interests, politics has become just a mediator of the global exploitation of both humans and natural resources.
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11th of September
Chapter. IV (The End)
15th of September
Afterword
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Silvia Amancei (b.1991) and Bogdan Armanu (b.1991) is an artist couple living and working in the city of Iasi, Romania. They graduated BA (2013) and MA (2015) studies at “George Enescu” University of Arts (Faculty of Visual Art and Design) in Iasi. Collaborating since 2012, their artistic practice could be positioned at the border of social studies and visual art, having as a main research interest the potentiality of art and artistic means to overexcite the ability to look beyond capitalism and create a (common) future.
an ethnographic archive of digital distribution
Often imagined as a pensive white man, wearing clothes in earthy colors, an odd hat and a rugged leather bag with an infamous notebook, Boris Malinowski fit the description of the ethnographer. Yet, his notebooks offer unexpected insights:
“Today, Monday, 9.20.14, I had a strange dream; homo-sex, with my own double as partner. Strangely autoeurotic feelings; the impression that I’d like to have a mouth just like mine to kiss, a neck that curves just like mine, a forehead just like mine (seen from the side)” 1.
One week after his arrival at Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea in 1914, a day after Malinowski began writing his diaries, a lifelong struggle started: homophily, the radical love of the same. In the face of extreme segregation – being all by himself in the tropics, not speaking the language of the indigenous, overwhelmed by ‘insomnia, overtaxed heart and nervousness,’ – he starts to feel desire for himself. It is this specific form of love for the same enhanced by narcissism that emerges when facing the radically different.
After every ‘jungle’ has been conquered by global capitalism in the last century, referring to Malinowski’s experience of homophily appears unfitting. However, autoeroticism has only shifted in the face of technology: From self-love in the face of the other to self-love without the other. Reality is organized in discrete units – ”digital islands of isolation that are drifting further apart each day.“ In discriminating accurately through their binarity, digits surround us with comfort and uniformity. Malinowski’s feverous jungle of endless depth and extraneousness has turned into seamless surfaces comfortably excluding the unknown. Engaged in this cosy architecture we find ourselves in Gated Communities. Personalized interfaces endure into sameness – we are encircled by ourselves.
Malinowski’s diary is both a space for ethnographic exploration and a documentation of homophilic ‘friction’ in its attempt to overcome his autoerotic segregation. warehouse aims to elaborate on this in changed socio-technical conditions. warehouse explores autoerotic segregation ethnographically and archives practices countering homophilies. From June to October warehouse will publish essays, artists’ moving images, interviews and performances on a weekly basis. Malinowski attempted to regulate and organize his struggles through the means of observing and writing on paper – warehouse will do so in offering a diagram of strategies countering homophily through frictional insertions: [entropy], [pray], [home], [adobe], [soft-fiction], [stranded]. A geometry to map a new normal; a topography for overcoming autoeroticism.
Fußnoten
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Malinowski, Broniwslaw: A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, London: The Athlone Press, London (1967), 12-13 ↩