X-CENTRIC FUTURES – Debate #4
Public screening and discussion of Bahar Noorizadeh’s films After Scarcity (2018) and The Red City of the Planet Capitalism (2021) followed by a live discussion with the filmmaker moderated by Erik Bordeleau.
How might we use computation to get us out of our current state of digital feudalism and towards new possible utopias? After Scarcity (31 min. 2018) is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks Soviet cyberneticians in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. Flying through swarms of floating dots outlining monasteries and city streets, After Scarcity flashes through decades of history to propose the ways contingent pasts can make fictive futures realer, showing us that digital socialism was inbred into the communist revolution and that computation doesn’t mean we’re condemned to today’s tyranny of total financialization.
After Scarcity will be preceded by The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism (13 min., 2021) a 13 min. video installation that revisits proposals for a communist sprawl in the Soviet Union of 1929.
Bahar Noorizadeh
Bahar Noorizadeh is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Her research examines the historical advance of speculative activity and its derivative politics in art, urban life, and finance and philosophy. Noorizadeh is the founder of Weird Economies, an online art platform that traces economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time. Her work has appeared at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial 2021, Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, Transmediale Festival, DIS Art platform, Berlinale Forum Expanded, and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images among others. Noorizadeh has contributed essays to e-flux Architecture, Journal of Visual Culture, and forthcoming anthologies from Duke University Press and Sternberg Press. She is pursuing her work as a PhD candidate in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she holds a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.
This event is funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under the project UIDB/00183/2020 within the scope of the activities of the X-Centric Futures research seminar (CultureLab/IFILNOVA), coordinated by Giovanbattista Tusa, and was developed in collaboration with Centro Cultural Carpintarias de São Lázaro.
All welcome. Free entry. Save your seat: reservas@csl-lisboa.pt.
We believe that there is a philosophical vacuum on the subject of futurity other than that imagined as a data visualisation leading to decision-making by corporate, administrative or political bodies. To some extent, it is as if philosophy has abdicated its function and delegated to corporate global think tanks the responsibility for formulating viable paths for the transformation of our present. To explore X-centric, divergent futures means for us to experiment with time, space, and politics. It means to complicate our time with invisible, insurgent, multiple temporalities that fissure the material layers of our history, to reframe global historical narratives that incorporate decolonising processes and climate justice, nurturing ourselves as a community, creating wishful images inhabited by unseen, dissident realities that are coming into being.
Research and dissemination activities have included The X-Centric Futures Monthly Debates Program, a series of public seminars organized by Giovanbattista Tusa and Bartholomew Ryan which took place in 2022 at the Cultural Centre Carpintarias de São Lázaro, featuring the art collective Claire Fontaine on Magical Materialism; the musical performance Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen by Michael Marder, Peter Schuback, and Márcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback; the presentation of Uriel Orlow’s Imbizo Ka Mafavuke; and the screening and discussion of Bahar Noorizadeh’s After Scarcity and The Red City of the Planet Capitalism.
In 2023 the ADVANCED PROGRAMME IN X-CENTRIC FUTURE STUDIES will combine the research seminar with workshops (in presential and remote format)and a student-led reading group in Lisbon to promote the growth of research and artistic projects on emerging social movements, future political constellations, and x-centric communities.