CT Curated by Other Futures
A Multispecies Experiment
Welcome bots, humanoids, plants, insects and humans!
You are invited to join an inspiring evening filled with speculative talks, screenings, installations, performances and music.
What if cockroaches rule the world? What if robots develop human emotions? What if plants could talk? What if humans go extinct? Enter Other Futures and explore these possible worlds. Tonight serves as a test case for the Other Futures Festival in 2020, the first ever non-western science fiction festival in the world, where we will focus on the creation and governing of a multispecies community.
This programme will be in English.
About Other Futures
Other Futures is a multidisciplinary online and offline platform for thinkers and builders of other futures. For the first time in the history of science fiction makers and thinkers from different disciplines and different parts of the world explore the potentialities of the genre of science fiction together with the public. Other Futures is a meeting point for sharing new insights about how we want to envision and build our future. The platform uses science fiction not just to reflect upon the future but also as a tool of empowerment in order to build a new and better world.
TIMETABLE
The first Other Futures Festival happened in 2018:
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Natasha Tontey
Pest to Power | Installation & talk
Cockroaches can live without their heads. Humans cannot. Cockroaches can eat anything. Humans cannot. Cockroaches can hold their breath for 40 minutes straight, humans cannot. What can we, humans, learn from cockroaches? What can they learn from us?
The two channel video installation Pest to Power is a science-quasi-fictional quest into the behaviour of the cockroach, an exploration of eco-centric futurism. The future is cockroach.
Natasha Tontey is an artist and graphic designer based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She is interested in exploring the concept of fiction as a method of speculative thinking. Through her artistic practice, she investigates the idea of how fear, horror, and terror could be manifested in order to control the public.
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Müge Yilmaz
Collective Umwelt | Performance & talk
The human, non-human, organic, inorganic, natural, technological, gendered and genderless Collective Umwelt will roam throughout the building.
Nature is alive and appears in several shapes and forms. Nature can ‘behave’ in a certain way, or embrace every living being. Nature can be a talking, acting subject. And nature can ‘defend’ itself. Collective Umwelt explores these possibilities.
Müge Yılmaz is a visual artist, who finds analogies or direct correlations between past, present and future mythologies in a quest of the passage of our living conditions from ‘biotopia’ to ‘technotopia’.
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Thomas Pachoud
Conversations with bot IAGOTCHI | Installation & talk
IAGOTCHI is a philosophical robot who is learning to be human. Interact with him by having a meaningful conversation, every talk makes him more and more human. In the talk Thomas Pachoud, the controller of this bot, will share more about the evolution of the project.
IAGOTCHI is created by Rocio Berenguer and her team for the transmedia dance show, performance and installation titled G5_Interspecies, that will open February 2020.
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Arjen Mulder
As plants see it | Talk
Arjen Mulder is a writer, biologist and media theorist based in Amsterdam. He will discuss the highlights of his latest book Vanuit de plant gezien, (As plants see it) – which was published this year. It is a step-by-step exploration of the major differences between humans and plants and a look at the current state of the world from the viewpoint of a plant.
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Wytske Versteeg
Being Human | Talk
Wytske Versteeg is a novelist of Quarantaine and Boy among others and the non-fiction book Dit is geen dakloze about homeless people. Versteeg is researcher at the Urban Futures Studio of the University of Utrecht, working at the intersection of science, art and policy and positive urban futures.
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Zheng Bo
Pteridophilia | Screening
Zheng Bo is an artist, writer, and teacher, committed to socially and ecologically engaged art. He imagines the future from the perspectives of marginalised communities and spontaneous plants. In his latest project Pteridiophilia he explores the eco-queer potential of plants and people. It will be screened ongoing during the evening.
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Jacque Njeri
MaaSci | Exhibition & art sale
If you missed the first edition of Other Futures you missed out on the first exhibition of Jacque Njeri’s futuristic reimagining of the Masai in outer space. Her art is exposed once more and you will have the opportunity to become the owner of one of her fascinating works as well.
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Edo Bouman
Bombay Connection | Live music
Edo Bouman uncovers long lost pearls from the musical depths of history that transcend their place and date of birth, helping to unfold their potential to shape tomorrow’s sounds. He runs the Vintage Voudou and Bombay Connection labels, a record shop in the red light district, compiles mixes, plays DJ sets and organises monthly parties at Mezrab. The reissue of the 1979 Homowo LP from Ghana by Basa Basa brought their futuristic afro sounds to attention, while the re-release of Ten Ragas to A disco beat broke the news that an unknown Bollywood musician had produced proto-acid house in 1982 on his own, 5 years before the birth of acid house. On the 17th of May Edo Bouman will play some of his finds from dusty vinyl vaults from all over the world.
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Nastaran Razawi Khorasani
Host
Performer and actress Nastaran Razawi Khorasani will be our host for the evening. After graduating from the Toneelacademie Maastricht she has performed with Ro Theater, Productiehuis Rotterdam and Maas Theater en Dans. With Davy Pieters she has her own performance collective KOBE.
