X-Centric Futures – Debate #1
In the first session of the X-Centric Futures Debates at Carpintarias de São Lázaro, the collective Claire Fontaine presents their Method of Magic Materialism developed to regroup a set of skills that have been discredited for political reasons. It is a materialism that derives from feminism, and its principal aim is to restore subjectivity for those creatures, who have been objectified by patriarchy – women, gender non-conforming persons, people of colour, children, and the natural world. Claire Fontaine’s method values reproductive work as much as productive work, it sees reproduction as a re-creation of one’s own subjectivity and collective relation space, it sees the body not as an exploitable mechanism but as a site of revolutionary potential and a battleground.
The X-Centric Futures Monthly Debates Program is a collaboration of the X-Centric Futures research seminar of the CultureLab of the NOVA Institute Of Philosophy, funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under the project UIDB/00183/2020, and the Cultural Centre Carpintarias de São Lázaro.
This collaborative effort aims to change the generally installed perception that the future is an inescapable and threatening age of social disruption and ecological catastrophes.
It seeks to develop rigorous critical practices and create an open platform for a dialogue between different perspectives in the redefinition of thinking in a planetary age.
Throughout the program of debates we start from the assumption that there is no humanity to come, but rather a multitude of different humanities with different futures and different pasts, whose exploration implies the development of new theoretical and practical frameworks and categories.
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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.