The explosion of futurisms in the last three decades as transmedial movements that engage in processes of futuring (i.e. imagining and visualizing new futures) can be termed CoFuturisms. CoFuturisms include, for instance, Afro- and Africanfuturisms, Indigenous Futurisms, Aadivasi Futurisms, Chicanafuturism, Latinxfuturisms, Gulf-futurism, Arabfuturism, Sinofuturism, Desifuturism, South Asian Futurism, Dalit Futurism, Asia Futurism, Andean Futurism, Ricepunk, and Silkpunk, among many others. If one is to define CoFuturisms, it would be as follows. CoFuturisms are the assertion of three rights of equality and vision: the right of everyone to exist, the right to imagine one’s own future, and the right to difference. Such assertion is key to self-representation and a marker of separation from other identities which one might share. Self-representation is particularly important for those whose futures have been (and continue to be) colonized in various ways. Colonization may take the form of continued economic dependence resulting from the machinations of global capitalism, or the continual cycle of wars and coups resulting from geopolitical interventions by foreign powers, or, quite simply, cultural colonization that erases and obliterates other forms of thinking and being in the world.

Hence these futurisms are not tied geographically; they belong to the world as ways of being in the world. Generating their own manifestos, these CoFuturisms now resonate around the world, emanating from the cultural and artistic sphere and transforming into social and political phenomena. These futurisms engage in worldbuilding, imagining possible futures as well as rewiring historical knowledge to recognize what has been erased or left out of history. The philosophy of history as a political project has always recognized future histories as a speculative project, but in CoFuturisms futures are already historical. The apocalypses of the future, such as those resulting from planetary ecocide, are not futures to come but futures that have always been here for people living in the reality of the devastation. There are Arabfuturisms in Europe and elsewhere, just as there are Eurofuturisms in the rest of the world because these futurisms are all constitutive of the other. Difference is carving out a space of existence between worlds: to find a space for some identities that constitute us by separating us from others that constitute us, even if we belong to multiple ones.

Beyond these continuing colonizations, as many formerly colonized states and peoples transform into hegemonies and colonizing forces of their own, the explosion of futurisms is only inevitable, and likely to continue, to the point where futurisms will arise wherever human beings seek to mark their own existence. Other CoFuturisms, such as LGBTQIA2S+ Futurisms, Queer futurisms, Xenofuturisms, and Crip-Futurisms, are for that reason just as inevitable as geopolitically or ethnically oriented ones, since they too emerge from the same basic principles: the right to exist, the right to imagine, and the right to difference. CoFuturisms resist unity and are fundamentally unstable. This is necessary if they are to retain their political potential and charge, since no single movement can be a new form of unifying discourse that erases other identities to assert itself. Beyond and within CoFuturisms, which refer to these movements, lie certain fundamental ethical propositions: propositions that are referred to by the philosophical concept of CoFutures. CoFuturisms are simply an instance of these propositions. These ethical propositions termed CoFutures are generative and motile and permanently in a state of unfolding into instances such as various futurisms.

What propositions are these? To some extent, our unruly capitalization gives us away: in the “Co” of CoFutures. The “Co” of CoFutures stands for six different ethical propositions, of which three are most relevant in the discussion of CoFuturisms: complexity, coevalness, and compossibility.

Complexity is the principle of diversity, and it unmasks uniformity as a totalitarian project. This means that any form of thinking or system-building that seeks to unwrap itself into a new form of totality and unity is inherently suspect. Complexity thrives on the proliferation of identities, values, knowledges, languages, ideas, and constantly seeks new forms of becoming. Uniformity is the totalitarianism at the heart of the political project of nation states, as well as the prison of ideas: it seeks to make everyone look, act, speak, believe, eat, and think the same, and be the same in mind, body, and spirit, rather than support the proliferation of identities that we really are as beings in the world. Therefore, the prisons of totality and uniformity always contain within them the seeds of their own dissolution. Looking at CoFuturisms, it is easy to see why the constant proliferation of new movements has become a defining trait of our times: it is because even CoFuturisms suffer from the risks of being monolithic and totalitarian. As movements, they work only as long as there are temporary conditions of coming together to achieve certain political ends, but they are easy to dissolve and dissipate into ever new forms of togetherness, new futurisms, afterwards. True diversity exists in a philosophical and ethical acceptance of the death of things we consider fundamental, including our values and identities themselves.

Coevalness is the state of things being in the same time, which is perhaps only a principle of respect that challenges the spatialization and weaponization of time. Coevalness means the rejection of a value system that has long colonized the world, whereby some cultures, some people, some nations, some technologies, some religions, some gender, some species, some ways of living and being are futuristic and progressive as compared to others. Such a value system automatically privileges some over others: for instance, one religion (or lack of one) is more progressive because of its espousal of some values while another is backward because it believes in something else, or one part of the world is more advanced and futuristic than another because it has greater technological or financial resources, etc. This value system is the lifeblood of colonialism, which forces the same understanding of teleological progress to the whole world and is backed by international financial instruments, as well as military and political muscle. Coevalness does not force us to suspend our understanding of what is more efficacious or useful, or what one might simply prefer over another. It rather demythologizes time to make us recognize that everything is in the same time, rather than in different times, and values do not stem from things being in different times. It also makes us recognize that what we consider values might just be a function of the resources or the privileges we have.

Compossibility, the third co, is the principle of balance. As a term, it refers to two things being together possible. Many futures are possible, but not all futures are together possible. Some futures, say, ethnically and culturally homogenous, supremacist, and bloodline or purity-oriented futures, are just as possible as futures that aim for diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity. Without making a value judgment on which future is preferable, compossibility simply asks us first to recognize that both these futures are equally possible. However, these futures are not possible together since they tend to cancel each other out due to their varying demands on the future. If one is to maintain complexity and coevalness, then compossibility makes it happen by directing us to futures that are together possible. Compossible futures are where different kinds of being and becoming can thrive, where diversity is not merely skin-deep but truly open to infinite kinds of proliferation and combinations, ever evolving more layers of possibilities.

CoFuturisms, as an instance of these propositions, are in the world to proliferate rather than to contain futures. Thus, instead of thinking of CoFuturisms themselves as some sort of coming together of various futurisms, which risks turning CoFuturisms into a monolithic concept and designation, the ”Co” disrupts this coming together except as a temporary state of political affiliation, achieving certain ends and moving on to becoming something else.

Take for instance, Arabfuturism, which is a central theme of this exhibition. In his “Towards a possible manifesto; proposing Arabfuturism(s) (Conversation A),” Scotland based artist-poet Sulaïman Majali conceives of Arabfuturisms in the plural and gestures toward CoFuturistic visions rather than outlining a monolithic futurism movement. Framing Arabfuturisms as a proposition and the manifesto itself as a possibility, Majali refrains from defining the principles and guidelines of an aesthetic or political project. Indeed, in a reinterpretation of the manifesto published in 2015, an extended note explicitly delinks Majali’s conception of Arabfuturisms from its connotations of “movement” and defines futurism as a mode of “anticipating a future,” “a defiant cultural break, a projection forward into what is, beyond ongoing eurocentric, hegemonic narratives.” Rooted in counter-cultural challenges to hegemonic definitions of identity, belonging, and futurity, Arabfuturisms call for an examination and activation of alternate possibilities latent in the present to envision and create diverse futures.

In their invitation to explore different pathways to possible presents, Arabfuturisms’ propositions encapsulate CoFuturistic concerns with complexity, coevalness, and compossibility. One way in which Arabfuturisms aim at complexity is through the sustained critique of reductive and homogenized definitions of identity and belonging. Such critique addresses all forms of othering that seek to suppress the complexity and movement of diverse, entangled, and proliferating identities—or in Majali’s words, “the emergence of an autonomous hybrid sedimentation of identities” (151). Written in a polyvocal and patchy style as an ongoing conversation, the manifesto resists closures, definitions, and completion also in its form. With its emphasis on complexity and breaking down established boundaries, Arabfuturisms are more concerned with proliferating forms of becoming than with defining an ethnofuturist vision.

Searching for new forms of representation “beyond the logic of the state,” Arabfuturisms are as critical of Eurocentric and colonial discourses and Orientalist stereotypes around Arabness as they are of Arab nationalist discourses, which welcome certain identities while suppressing others (151). Moving beyond the logic of the state requires a thorough questioning and dismantling of nationalist discourses through the critical re-examination of history. Such discourses often mobilize restrictive conceptions of origins and teleological conceptions of time to claim the superiority/futurity of a group while relegating others to an insurmountable state of belatedness, backwardness, or lack. Arabfuturisms reject such hierarchical and essentialized divisions between peoples and highlight instead their coevalness. The futures are many; they are everywhere; and they are for everyone to envision and build, even if hegemonic value systems adhere to a hierarchical organization of futurity. The principle of coevalness does not accept such hierarchical divisions at face value and calls instead for an acknowledgement of the histories of dispossession and oppression that underlie power inequalities. This is why the re-examination of history and the unearthing of neglected histories are central features of many Arabfuturist works which imagine the future by rewriting the past. These works often demonstrate how hegemonic claims to the future are founded upon violent and dismissed histories of colonialism, imperialism, and racism. Arabfuturisms underscore the necessity of envisioning futures in conversation with these histories to produce new conceptions of futurity.

As an artist based in Europe, Majali’s Arabfuturist imaginary may have been inspired primarily by the experiences of discrimination faced by diasporic Arab communities in Europe. He writes, “There is something happening in Europe,” and adds “It is a citadel of illusion that has collapsed” (153). Yet, such citadels and their accompanying colonial and nationalist ideologies are not unique to Europe, and they are being challenged across the Middle East and globally by CoFuturisms. Particularly in the past decade, there has been a considerable growth in the number of authors, artists, and filmmakers who employ speculative and futuristic storytelling not only in Arabic speaking countries but also in Turkey and Iran, and their diasporas. Although the discussions around Arabfuturisms have so far focused predominantly on the work of visual artists in the diaspora, Arabfuturisms find expression also in the literature and music produced in the Middle Eastern and North African contexts. Arabic literary criticism often situates texts with Arabfuturist concerns within genre discussions on science fiction, utopia, and dystopia. Yet, many Arabfuturist texts cross genre and media boundaries; they merge classical and modern genres, colloquial and formal registers of language, and combine oral, visual, and performative modes of storytelling with writing. Arabfuturisms are CoFuturistic both in this transmediality and in the sense that their concerns extend beyond Arab identity and Europe toward a more global outlook. In seeking “collaborative genealogies” (153) that can establish solidarities with decolonization and social justice struggles elsewhere, Arabfuturisms invite us to envision different forms of becoming possible together.

References
Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2021. “Manifestos of Futurisms”. Foundation vol.50(2), no.139. 8-23.

Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2022. “Speculative Futures of Global South Infrastructures.” In  Urban Infrastructuring: Reconfigurations,  Transformations and Sustainability in the Global South. Ed. Deljana Iossifova et al. SpringerNature: Sustainable Development Goals Series. 297-208.

Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2020. “The Pandemic That Was Always Here, and Afterward: from Futures to CoFutures.” Science Fiction Studies 47.3. 338-340

Majali, Sulaïman. 2015. ‘Towards a Possible Manifesto; Proposing Arabfuturism(s) (Conversation A)’. In Cost of Freedom: A Collective Enquiry. Ed. Clément Renaud. No publisher. 151-3. http://costoffreedom.cc (accessed 01 December 2023). [The reinterpretation is available on  https://futuresofcolour.tumblr.com/post/161897827578/towards-arabfuturisms-manifesto-words-artwork]

Tabur, Merve. 2021. Ends of Language in the Anthropocene: Narrating Environmental Destruction in Turkish, Arabic, and Arab-Anglophone Speculative Fiction. Pennsylvania State University, PhD Dissertation.

Tabur, M. 2024. “Settling the Desert, Unsettling the Mirage: Urban Ecologies of Arab and Gulf Futurisms in Ahmed Naji’s Using Life.” Utopian studies, 35(1): 187-208. https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.35.1.0187

photo: Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘CoFutures Motif 3: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank’. Ħal Tarxien, 2018

Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. SUBSCRIBE NOW TO STAY CURRENT.

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In “Transversal: Commons Tense & Antihegemonial Tactics,” Fatih Aydoğdu examines how art, media, and activism intersect to influence contemporary socio-political conditions. He argues that art’s visual language is deeply connotative, embedding cultural semantics that extend beyond mere representation. Digital arts, distinct from traditional forms, engage audiences actively, transforming art into a platform for socio-political critique. Aydoğdu highlights mass media’s role in shaping public opinion and emphasizes networked societies as new public spaces for communication. He situates art within broader socio-economic changes, advocating for its role in challenging hegemonic structures and fostering alternative social visions.

“The limits of my language…, the limits of my world …” ¹

An art practice, which operates by means of individual criteria and frame conditions, does not necessarily establish lasting (museal) merits, but creates a proper aesthetics of communication. Categories of analysis, tactical media, activist interventions react upon and/or influence the current social conditions. Via its pragmatics, swift or uncomplicated media produces a modality, which embraces the implementation of different procedures – aesthetical, activist or partly theoretical ones.

The connotative level of the visual, from the point of view of its contextual reference and positioning in different discursive meaning and association realms, denotes the point where al- ready coded signs meet the depth of the semantic code of a culture and adopt additional, more active dimensions. Here, there exists no pure objective (denotative) – and least of all natural – representation. Each visual sign (in a specific language) connotates a characteristic – a value or a conclusion – which is present depending on its connotating position as implication or implicated meaning.

The fields of preferred concepts hold social structures in the form of meanings, practices and opinions: the popular knowledge of social structures, of how all practical concerns function within this culture, of the ranking of power and interest and of the structures of legitimating, limitations and determinations. Thus, the chosen signs have to be related by means of codes to the order of the social life, to the economic, political power and the ideology, in order to make them readable. The term “reading” does not merely point at the capability to identify and decode a special number of signs, but it also addresses a subjective ability to relate these to other signs in a creative approach: a skill that is a precondition for conscious acting within an environment.

As long we can reflect upon ourselves through the world of art and reflect upon art through our world, the meaning of art can take on various forms and purposes, such as counter-balancing political conditions in the form of an upside-down-pissoir. Digital arts, takes the network society as its plane of resonance. Different than traditional/modern art, digital arts invites the audience to actively take part in the art work rather than merely provoking them. This quality is, of course, contained in the very nature of art. In a way, art functions to re-invent itself, time, and environment by responding and commenting on the socio-cultural and political contexts. By so doing, it creates other alternate visions while incorporating various available medium and technologies in order to achieve this goal. Here, politicization is not just an attitude operating through practices of production but it is an essential component of a concrete structural positioning. Art consists of a platform, which blends its field of interaction with creative, technical, and social energies by which it resolves and redefines such forces. It functions to pinpoint and question the contradictions and inconsistencies that operate within such forces that falls in its scope of analysis.

The strategies used or described in art are not limited to innovation or tradition. In this sense, each artwork may function as a ‘shifter’ among other artworks, meaning, it comments on the world on the basis of its differentiation to other artworks. From a societal perspective, this differentiation does not only function to ‘label’ the work of art according to its form (such as ‘revolutionary’, ‘innovative’, ‘epigonal’). Rather, art attains its meaning on the basis of its positioning within a certain social context, which entails artworks that are not as strongly related to the public domain such as Art in Public spaces, Street Art, mobile- applications or participatory art. Top- down-art is art that we obtain one way or another, bottom-up-art is art that we need to obtain one way or another. Each artwork is a question addressed at society at large.

Despite the common association of network society with omnipresent control and surveillance (which could perhaps explain why traditional arts tend to lean towards individualization and a-socialization), social media, network structures, and the Internet are perhaps the final “public space” that we possess as individuals today.

Massmedia (as a passive consumption device), which have rapidly influenced our everyday life since the second half of the 19th century, play a strong role in determining our agenda at present. Since the decrease in the political and social connotations of “public space” in a modernist, transparent, and cognitive society, “massmedia” has taken on a central role in the creation and dissemination of meaning, taking public opinion under its hegemony and replacing “knowledge” -so important to cognitive society- with metaphors of “meaning” and “opinions”.

Here, “public” denotes a passive monitoring formula. On the one hand, “public” designates the impossibility of going beyond the internal operations of the system; on the other hand, it points to the possibility of new types of communication with other external systems. Hence, the meaning and ideas produced by the media do not actually represent the opinion of the public.

The rapid rise of the turbocapitalist system resulting from the fall of the iron curtain in 1989 and the cold war, the loss of public commons as a result of the privatization necessary for “economic growth”, the crises of participatory democracy, the dilemma between transnationalism and nationalisms, the decrease of individual rights after 9/11 under the banner of protection from terror, religion wars, our irresponsible consumption of world resources, financial crises, bankruptcies emerging from the management of democratic states as private companies released from social responsibilities, the diminishment of working rights and essential social structures of a society, moving towards (social, political, and economic) erosion as a result of the growing gap between different classes, in society: although we may have become accustomed and insensitive to the daily catastrophic images imposed on us by massmedia, we believe that this description of our current situation is not exaggerated.

¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus logico-philosophicus

This text is published before, in the catalogue of the Exhibition “Commons Tense/Müşterekler Zamanı” (amberTXT/BIS), Curated by Fatih Aydoğdu and Ekmel Ertan, Den Haag/NED 2012
In frame of the Todays Art Festival 2012 

By connecting social media with discussions on ecology, society, and participatory democracy from a social organizational perspective, “Commons Tense/ Müşterekler Zamanı” establishes an alternative platform for re-constructing urgent societal questions, to search for solutions to existing and future crises, to advocate the need for self-organization within the hegemony of market economy, which privatizes all aspects of everyday life.

Digital Commons are platforms offering tools, information, theory, art, and culture that are open for public and are free. Commons are what we share with others. Commons/ Müşterekler is a new form of expression that goes beyond the hegemony of the market and centralized modes of control and, therefore, it is a kind of language.

“Commons Tense / Müşterekler Zamanı” designates a hypothetical language that goes beyond local and national data to discuss certain problems, and to produce alternative options within the current social, economic, and political systems in which we live in.

It establishes a foresight to think beyond borders physically and intellectually, within and without the system.

https://issuu.com/ekmelertan/docs/commons_tense

Fatih AYDOĞDU (b. 1963 | Turkey) lives and works in Vienna and Istanbul. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Aydoğdu is a conceptual visual artist, designer, curator, writer, and sound artist, focusing on concepts of media aesthetics, migration & identity politics, and linguistic issues. He participated in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia, and the USA. He was the publisher of Turkey’s first media art magazine, “hat” (1998). He worked a.o. as a member of the Curatorial Board of ‘amberPlatform,’ an art & technology platform based in Istanbul, between 2011 and 2019.

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It was in March 2015 that I noticed for the first time a missing person’s poster. I was waiting for the tube in London. I stared long at that face in the poster, trying to memorize it, wondering whether I could later recognize it. That evening, I began an intense and emotional journey as I became obsessed with the ongoing search for a boy who disappeared thirty-five years ago.

K was a sixteen-year-old boy living in the south of London. One night in March 1986, he walked out of his house to visit the local grocery store. He was never seen ever since. Twenty-nine years later, I was standing in front of his house, only to discover that not only he has disappeared, but the neighborhood he once knew has likewise vanished. His family no longer owned his home. His school was demolished. The store is now a restaurant. Even the police station where he was reported missing is no longer operating.

My experience studying documentary photography in London that year was centered around my investigation of this cold case. I was collecting archival material from newspaper snippets, police documents, missing persons’ appeals, and blog posts discussing K’s unresolved disappearance. I was particularly struck when I discovered the ongoing search led by K’s younger sister. Until today, she continues to spread appeals hoping for closure, hoping to see her now assumed fifty-one-year-old brother.

The curiosity driving my research led me to philosophical readings about sight, invisibility, and not knowing. As I  wondered about how the search is for both a sixteen-year-old boy and a fifty-one-year-old man, I was reading about Schrödinger’s cat and the state of quantum superposition. And when I encountered the age-progressed computer-generated portrait of K, I was reading about the mythical Gorgons with faces that no one can look at. The more I delved into such contemplations, the more I returned to the same question: What truly lay at the centre of my obsession?

It was quite late at night, a few hours before dawn.
There was a full moon lighting the sky
and casting shadows on the ground.
Soft wind stroked a layer of sand from time to time.
Other than that, barely anything else moved around
until I heard a sound coming from afar.
I did not wonder for long what it was,
for then I saw a man rushing towards the valley.
His pace was fast, and at once, I recognized his face.
He came here years ago, and just like now,
he looked as if he had been walking towards someone else,
someone he could not wait to be nearby.  
—Excerpt from the book’s mystical tale

My journey, which began in the south of London in the winter, brought me to the Sinai peninsula in Egypt in the summer. There, I was retracing a mystical tale I had read in the Quran: The collapse of a mountain in the presence of Moses who asked to see a glimpse of God, despite being allowed to hear Him. At the centre of this tale, I  saw the human dependence on sight, in spite of which faith is paradoxically formulated. In juxtaposition, the ongoing search for K by his younger sister with appeals featuring his age-progressed face became a reflection of the strength of faith in the face of uncertainty.

By the end of my study in London, I had put together several publications. I made seven zines, each exploring an aspect of K’s case. I designed two booklets titled The Search for the Invisible In a Space of Infinite Possibilities I and II. In Part I, I curated the archival textual and visual research material I had been collecting. For Part II, I made a series of photographs which I embroidered that retrace the search for K. With the embroidery, I invited the reader to reveal the photographs hidden behind the threads. As for the tale in Sinai, I juxtaposed it with the case in London in a photobook titled The Invisible: Faith as a Phenomenon. In their totality, these handmade books acted like a research dossier that reflected my obsession with what it means to search for what the eye cannot see.

Six years later, I decided to revisit these publications with the intention to transform their essence into a concise narrative. Instead of several booklets that reflect the complexity of this multi-faceted project, I wanted to design a new book that would invite a more immersive experience. And so, I began to conceptualise the book’s form, layout, and binding technique. I re-edited the photographic narrative, focusing on how best to interweave the tale from Sinai with the case from London. I reworked the epilogue’s essay and wrote a story narrated from the perspective of a mountain to illustrate the mystical tale. Then, I focused particularly on further developing the embroidering concept.

With a Stitch-Me edition for the resulting book titled Let My Eyes Have a Glimpse of you, I am inviting the readers to embroider the photographs themselves. Using red thread referring to what the missing boy was wearing,  the embroidery accentuates areas within the photographed scenes. It acts as a tactile invitation to imagine what may have happened in this cold case. As the book readers engage with the intimate and time-consuming practice of stitching, I hope they reflect on the long and difficult journey traveled by those longing for years to see the faces of their loved ones.

Sara Sallam (1991) is an Egyptian multidisciplinary artist, designer, visual researcher, and book maker based in the Netherlands. She works with photography, video, and writing, often re-appropriating and manipulating archival material to invite hidden meanings to emerge. Themes of absence, loss, and longing run throughout her work in which she explores ways of visualizing things we cannot see and portraying people we can no longer meet.

If you’d like to learn more about Sara’s work, visit her website, subscribe to her free newsletter, or join her on Patreon to read similar insights into her process.

Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. SUBSCRIBE NOW TO STAY CURRENT.

The post On Seeing, Searching, and the Book “Let My Eyes Have a Glimpse of You”—Sara Sallam appeared first on Sumac Space.