Alterfuturisms: Decentring Speculative Imaginaries

Alterfuturisms: Decentring Speculative Imaginaries brought together speakers from diverse cultural and academic backgrounds to challenge sci-fi traditions and explore overlooked ideas from the past, in order to imagine radically different futures. As well as presentations by Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Sonya Dyer, Ayoung Kim, Larissa Sansour and Morehshin Allahyari, with conversations moderated by Kareem Estefan and Amy Ireland, the day featured introductions and closing remarks by Nabila Abdel Nabi, Senior Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, Val Ravaglia, Curator, Displays and International Art at Tate Modern, Katrina Nzegwu, Assistant Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, and Irene Campolmi, Curator for Art, Technology and Society at Amos Rex.

The event put a particular emphasis on diverting away from Euro-American, colonial, extractivist, late capitalist and Western-centric narratives of the future, by adopting feminist, Global Majority, queer and trans- and post-humanist approaches. To understand what the event was pushing against, it helps to have a picture of the future that Alterfuturisms sought to displace. The speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin described precisely the kind of story we have heard enough of, referring to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey: ‘Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilise it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all?’1

The premise of Alterfuturisms was this: it is time for different stories.

Being an artist who makes work to break the dominant techno-industrial narrative, I came to the day with a particular investment in stories that fracture violent, unsustainable visions of progress – and I left struck by something neither I nor the event’s introductory materials anticipated: the speakers were less interested in the future than in the transformative potential already latent in the present.

The speakers, while coming from different countries and with diverse practices, all described a world in a devastating state. They spoke of polycrises – failing systems compounding each other into oblivion – and of a world changing too swiftly to describe. While the day’s presentations and discussions about the future were illuminating, the real potential for change was more emergent, immediate and achievable. The past continuously forms our perception of the present; by redressing our past narratives we may create immediate change in the now. Each of the speakers offered a gently seismic movement: nothing as simple as calling for the end of capitalism, but a micro phase shift that, by changing the narrative of either the future or the past, creates a practically and physically different present.

Val Ravaglia’s introduction highlighted non-Western notions of time that would be present throughout the day, such as the Indigenous concept of ‘Native Slipstream’, where past, present and future flow together rather than progressing in a straight line.2 More than Slipstream fiction, which already does not remain within set boundaries of genre or narrative, Native Splistream specifically highlights Indigenous, non-linear temporalities. This is not merely a poetic idea: as physicist and philosopher Karen Barad argued in ‘Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness’ (2018), human histories, presents and futures are woven into a single temporal mesh, each shaping the others.3 Everything we see, hear and smell is interpreted according to past recollections of similar experiences; your sense of current self is based on past experiences and how you narrate them today. In that sense, the past lives with us in the now and how we narrate the past can alter the present.

The most direct illustration of this idea came from Iranian-Kurdish artist Morehshin Allahyari, whose presentation opened up the question of what happens when the past is not just re-narrated but physically reclaimed. Her project Speculations on Capture 2024, commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, imagines returning astronomical instruments from the Islamic Golden Age – originating in Iran and Pakistan, now held in Western museum collections – to the communities and knowledge systems who made them. Just as language creates reality by describing it, the use of objects, more than being a product of technological times, creates knowledge. The archive records how these objects were made and where they have been, Allahyari observes; it contains no data about what their removal cost their maker‘s knowledge. These instruments were created at a moment when science and magic – including the forecasting of futures – belonged to the same discipline. Returning them, even speculatively, introduces another branch of knowing – a glitch – into the Western timeline: turning the soil of history, allowing something long buried to resurface, the mesh of past, present and future remaining entangled.

If Allahyari’s work shows how reclaiming the past can open new (old) presents, artist and writer Gary Zhexi Zhang’s lecture demonstrated how disorienting and systemically complex the present already is, with multiple catastrophic timelines happening in parallel. Focusing on China as a geopolitical phenomenon, Zhang moved at speed through what he called ‘upstream realities’ – the forces shaping the world before most of us have noticed them, tracking China’s simultaneous role as the world’s factory floor and its most dynamic engine of innovation, describing a planet changing faster than language can capture.

Two of his examples were especially striking. Pakistan, having turned to Chinese-made solar panels to escape the grip of payments owed to its China-financed power plants, is now leading a solar revolution increasingly being joined by other countries in order to refuse the power of petrostates. The second example was a Chinese factory that received an order for drone components from Ukraine and, within a week, was advertising the same parts to Russia. As Australian writer and theorist Amy Ireland mentioned in a conversation with Zhang and Sonya Dyer following the artists’ presentations, we are living through an epistemological fracture – a moment when the very category of ‘reality’ has become unstable and, I would add, is destabilised further by entangled crises, AI slop, fake news and the proliferation of misinformation.

During the Q&A, Zhang asked why this chaos is so hard to grapple with – whether our difficulty stems both from what is happening and our grief for what we thought the world was supposed to be. But a world in continuous, unpredictable transformation – what philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called ‘becoming’ – is not only a catastrophe.4 I believe this ‘becoming’ reality has emergent potential. In order to respond to the present we must first accept its nature, a chaotic reality that is constantly glitching, breaking away from what we thought it should have been. Our entangled, time-enmeshed world is at a point of constant systemic glitch, of collapse, and from this state of emergency – of emergence – we have room to make something new. All we are left with is now.

Screened in the afternoon, Ayoung Kim’s 3-channel film Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver 2024 gave this idea of a glitching, time-entangled world a poignant shape. Its two protagonists – Ernst Mo and En Storm (both anagrams of ‘monster’) – are versions of the same person from parallel realities, drawn to each other throughout space-time in a collision that is at once romantic and lethal. The film’s visual treatment – different animation styles weaving in and out of the frame like a stream of consciousness – mirrors its subject: a narrative that seems to sprout from chaos, carrying the viewer like a current. The artist researched systems for measuring time from the ancient to premodern era, looking up towards the planets, as well as inwards into the atom. She challenges the dominance of Greenwich Mean Time and the linear conception of progress it encodes, and recalls a world of multiple, coexisting temporalities that modernity has suppressed. Her protagonists inhabit a glitchy series of ‘nows’, leaking between one moment and another.

Kim’s exploration of the instability of the present continued a thread woven by Sonya Dyer: the political stakes of precarity, and the question of whose crises get to matter. Her performance-lecture asked what the role of the futurist is, when the future looks so bleak. Her answer to this, to my understanding, is to highlight what is absent and to make a part-blank picture more whole. Why, she asked, do we prioritise “Whiter” crises (fires in LA) over “Blacker” ones (child slavery for cheap technology; the complete uninhabitable near future of the Saharan belt causing the displacement of 20 million people; whole countries disappearing beneath rising seas; the ongoing devastation in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Congo and Sudan, and more)? Bringing the future into the present, Dyer reminded the audience that most of the world’s young people right now are Africans – so the future, statistically, will be the inheritance of the now-marginalised. The role of the futurist is to perform the hard work of presents, and remind us that we cannot take the liberty of giving up. ‘Nothing can be born that isn’t imagined’, she said. In Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021), Lola Olufemi explores the notion of radical hope, and argues that imagining isn’t a passive activity, but work that we must carve out with blood, sweat and tears.5 We must work to imagine a world where no one person’s freedom is bought at the expense of another. To hope is Dyer’s work – to thread through the muck and find a way through.

Where Dyer located transformative potential in the act of imagination, artist and researcher Naomi Rincón Gallardo found it in something more visceral: the willingness to go underground. Rincón Gallardo described her practice as ‘underworld making’, an invitation to visit the cracks, mouths and bellies of the earth. Her psychedelic, funny and loaded film Dung Kinship 2024, is inspired by Mesoamerican mythologies where time moves in inward, outward and deepening spirals. A fly-woman descends into a world filled with raving monsters celebrating their queerness with a deep connection to each other and respect to their myths. The fly-woman is told not to give birth or bring new life, but instead to dig and process the decomposing matter of the world into something we can work with. Dung Kinship doesn’t deal with the future, but makes direct suggestions to the present. Maybe there are enough people in the world to care for. Maybe we have enough rubbish to deal with. And maybe this work of tending and processing is itself a form of transformation.

Another thread of the day concerned the archive, and the question of how objects, images and narratives can be used to reclaim pasts and futures that exist but are not seen. Palestinian-Danish artist and filmmaker Larissa Sansour deliberately deploys Hollywood production values and cinematic tropes as subversive tools. Glitching the expectation that Palestinian filmmakers will forever make documentaries focused on their suffering, she instead makes films – such as A Space Exodus 2009 and Nation Estate 2012 – showing a highly technologically advanced Palestinian society. A Space Exodus confronts a double standard and asks why a US flag on the moon is seen as a symbol of progress but a Palestinian flag is perceived as a threat or act of aggression.

In a conversation between Sansour and Allahyari, moderator Kareem Estefan discussed reclaiming unseen histories using rogue temporal agents. In Sansour’s In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain 2015 a protagonist plants fabricated relics in a bombed land so that they will be found in the future as evidence of Palestinian presence. Once found, someone will say ‘this land was Palestinian, and they ate from the finest porcelain’. Referring to real practices of archaeological colonialism in Israel/Palestine, Sansour uses the land as a vessel to reach into the future, thus changing the past.

What united the six presentations at Alterfuturisms was not a shared vision of the future but a shared practice of the present. Each proposed immediate narrative shifts – a reframing of the archive, a different system of timekeeping, a story told from underneath – that can cause the present to change as soon as we embrace them. The event set out to decentre Western futures; what it revealed, more urgently, was that the tools for doing so already exist, lodged in overlooked pasts and marginalised knowledge systems, waiting to be reclaimed. The fly-woman processes the detritus. The astronomer’s instrument sits in a museum case. The relic lies buried in bombed earth. The future does not need to be invented; it is already here, in everything we have not yet allowed ourselves to remember.