Talking about the Future - a multi-layered narration about the possibilities and impossibility of the Future

Talking about the Future – a multi-layered narration about the possibilities and impossibility of the Future

By Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu

-conceptual framework-

Searching for answers and solutions for the reorganisation of life and global social relations, critique and artistic intention remain captured within aesthetics and poetry. Finding oneself between the hammer and the anvil, the compromises and limits of art have to be renegotiated: How real is the potentiality of artistic criticality? How to speculate the future and social change without falling into the net of fetishization? How to capitalize on the imagination capacity of poetry in order to compose a future in common outside the logic of money? How to break the borders of the world, be it material or digital, and distribute knowledge and wealth across the world?

…

21st of August
Cap. I (After the End)

28th of August
Cap. II (Images of the Possible)

4th of September
Cap. III (Politics of the Present)

11th of September
Cap. IV (The End)

15th of September
Afterword

…

digital residency

warehouse grants six Digital Residents in the duration of the project. The Residents deal with the production conditions of the internet and its practices of archiving.

[soft-fiction]

Hard is the opposite of soft. Hard implies exact measurement, substantial confines, clear distinctions: Physics. When Chick Strand made Soft Fiction in 79' ...

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

Malinowski, Broniwslaw: A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, London: The Athlone Press, London (1967), 12-13 ↩