Documentation: Imaginaries of Transformation – Looking back from the Future

2 July 2021, online

This time-travel session takes us from desirable futures back to our complicated past, asking: How do we imagine transformation? Centering on a performative interview with Amaranta Herrero and Dimitris Papadopoulos, set in 2050, this session engages the playful and transdisciplinary method of the Future Archive project. Developed and facilitated by Manuela Zechner, this method consists in dreaming and drawing up desirable futures, this time through the lens of pandemic video conferencing. Do you remember where the pandemic took our imaginaries of change? Where are you now, in 2050? Dimitris Papadopoulos tells of alterontological horizons and developments, inspired by the more-than-social movements that keep emerging. Amaranta Herrero was a traveller across academia and policy making back in 2021, and now reflects on newer everyday urban food sovereignty and ecofeminist revolutions. Manuela Zechner contributes reflections on how care and inhabitation have shifted, placing lives and bodies at the center of our common attention again. Animating and complicating questions of what is desirable, this session encourages to go beyond strictly utopian and dystopian visions of the future, based on their own implicatedness in worlds and struggles.

With:

Dimitris Papadopoulos (University of Nottingham)
Amaranta Herrero (Barcelona Sustainable Food Capital; University of Tromsø)

Organized/facilitated by:

Manuela Zechner (Jena University)
Iris Hilbrich (Hamburg University)

In cooperation with the “MovE” research project‘s strand on “Transversal and translocal connections across ecology and care”, Jena University. Hosted by the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Futures of Sustainability”, University of Hamburg.