FUTURS D’AVANT.

Climatic and political transformations are knocking on the door in these first decades of the 21st century, becoming evident with the coronavirus pandemic, prompting us to question how we live in a society that is putting its survival at risk with short- to medium-term plans. Faced with an intimidating and obscure scenario, art today can resonate in unexpected ways, and artists, in their constant quest to imagine what is still unknown, can teach us to embrace uncertainty. The genre of science fiction reminds us that we have the power to formulate other possibilities for the future. If the future is a fiction, a projection, or, if we prefer, a mental construction, what kind of narratives do we want to project in order to imagine a future that is more engaging than the uncertainty of our present situation? How can art help us to envision them?

In her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin analyses the recurring story that is told about the development of mankind and explains that, being an aging woman, she feels no connection with the heroic figure of the “mammoth hunter”. However, there is a narrative for her and for the many other people who are excluded from this brave myth: from the Palaeolithic to prehistoric times, humans mostly ate foods gathered in nature (plants, seeds, small animals, etc.), not the meat of large prey that involved hunting. Le Guin then asks why we don’t recognize and tell more stories about the invention of the bags, containers, baskets and bowls that met the primary needs of carrying and storing food. This story, however, may not be as exciting and engaging as the male narrative of the adventurous hunter. In her writing, Le Guin set out to write science-fiction novels that work as a kind of “bag”: one that not only contains the myth of the bold hero, but also beginnings without ends, spaceships that get stuck, missions that fail, more tricks than conflicts and far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions: “Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.”

Science-fiction and speculative fiction offer the opportunity to imagine futures more freely, without commitment to accurate projections. Yet it must be said that in most of the classic works of the genre the same power structures present in our current society are replicated. Their narratives are centred around the male who explores, while women and persons of colour relegated to secondary roles – they are not the ones building new cosmologies and developing technologies. Looking at science-fiction that is written by multiple voices might provide an opportunity to imagine other future worlds that do not reproduce the same structural traps in which we find ourselves today. Octavia Butler’s Parables books, for instance, provide a provocative counter-narrative for thinking about the current commercial exploration of space promoted by the heroic “mammoth hunters” of our times, capitalist billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Butler’s space mission is founded on a collective dream so radical that it must be projected in space.

What kind of world-making do we want to take forward? If the future remains a fiction, then there is still scope for creating other worlds. The artists engaged in this reflection on science-fiction do not neglect the past when seeking clues for thinking about the future. They see technology as a tool for the preservation of ancestral knowledge and the imagining of alternative realities.

Online platform founded in 2017 by Livia Benedetti and Marcela Vieira to showcase artworks created specifically for the internet. Each edition presents a single project and the featured artists have all been challenged with creating a work whose only vehicle is the internet, most doing so for the first time. aarea’s activities extend beyond its website, in partnership with other institutions, curatorial projects and public programs.