AIROOM residency presents Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson and BNF (Bureau of New Futures) sessions #1: FUTUR ANTÉRIEUR

2016-07-19

What is the taste of silence? Which colour do you see when you close your eyes? Which sound will for you, in 30 years time, trigger memories of 2016? Which is the future we will build together, and how will the story of our present be told in 2046?

The futur antérieur (future perfect) tense in French is used to express a future action or event that will be completed before another future action or to describe a future action or event that will have been completed in the future: j’aurai vu (I will have seen), j’aurai quitté (I will have left)….

The workshop FUTUR ANTÉRIEUR by Nine Yamamoto-Masson (of the Bureau for New Futures) is an exercise in imagining a future using experimental techniques and simultaneously discussing the political potential of creative imagination to turn into concrete action towards equity and social justice beyond mere descriptive self-referential discourse-production. It is an exercise in future-making.

With a multi-stop trajectory of texts, screenings, discussion and several creative exercises (some of them hands-on with paper, others more based in creative writing), the workshop aims to activate, deploy and correlate the participants’ imagination, experience and individual sensibilities.

The session itself will be based on an assemblage (Deleuze) or a tool-kit (Ballard) of various texts: short articles, quotes, short videos, poems, excerpts of short stories, objects and participants’ own texts around the themes of migration, liminality (in-betweenness, not fitting in, neither here nor there), marginalisation, labor, unlearning, everyday resistance, creative expression, solidarity…

Together, we will use a dérive (Debord/Situationists Internationale) approach of and through these texts and trace the resonances between them using decolonial and intersectional feminist methodologies as well as aesthetic strategies borrowed from speculative fiction and post-futurism.

Several short video pieces will be screened:
– The Secret Keeper (2014) by Thembani Mdluli (Canada / South Africa), Digitised Intermedia Installation 05:13
– Grada Kilomba: Dealing with Racism in Europe (youtube clip of an interview) 05:17
– more clips TBA (probably 2-3 more clips)

Short texts (excerpts) by
– Jorge Luis Borges
– Richard Brautigan
– Ibuse Masuji

(participants: ca. 25 max, no prior art experience necessary; the session will be held in English, RSVP to kostikovaite@gmail.com)

Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson is a French-Japanese artist, practising theorist, researcher, translator and PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. In academic research and artistic practice, her work examines and mobilises historical memory, ideology, resistance and counter-narratives at the site of their encounter with socially engaged art and radical creative imagination as a critical forum and as method of resistance towards social justice. Using a decolonial intersectional feminist framework, she examines configurations of power, prejudice, violence, representation in everyday life and analysis the necro-geopolitics our bodies and existence are entangled 
In Berlin she works with self-organised grassroots anti-racist organisations that provide support for refugees and work against gender-based-discrimination.