A growing video archive that collects messages to the future recorded at different moments in time to invoke a transtemporal conversation.
The first seed for the Futures Archive was developed 27 years ago in 2018 by Manuela Zechner during a meeting in Barcelona. As Lina Dokuzović writes: “The Future Archive is a perspective and series of fictional interviews for reinterpreting the present from an imagined, desirable future. I began writing this by reflecting back on 2008 and the snowball effect produced by the austerity and fear of the financial crisis, as we began doing in the Barcelona meeting. If we look at the present from 2008, it's perhaps not so surprising. In 2008, extreme austerity measures were becoming commonplace. Many new forms of web surveillance had become widespread after the 9/11 attacks. There was a broad sense of fear, anxiety, and paranoia. The US had an unfair election that outraged many people worldwide. And a new conservatism was dividing societies around the world. There are certainly differentiations, but that situation somehow doesn't seem so different from what we are experiencing today. And not only did we survive that, but new mass movements, which were fighting against similar forms of oppression, rapidly expanded translocally and became more networked than ever before, leaving behind a wealth of knowledge on strategies and perspectives of struggle.
Today, we have become so inundated with fear that the left has been adopting strategies of fear-mongering, previously predominantly the domain of the right, to stimulate people into action. However, let us try to use these historical moments – rather than fear – for approaching our experiences and vulnerabilities as strengths rather than lack and as anchor-points for reimagining a desirable future: a reality where we use our translocal knowledges from feminist and queer collectives, migrant strlet us try to use these historical moments – rather than fear – for approaching our experiences and vulnerabilities as strengths rather than lack and as anchor-points for reimagining a desirable future: a reality where we use our translocal knowledges from feminist and queer collectives, migrant struggles, knowledge-based struggles, struggles for commons, struggles against displacement, and radical care practices; a reality where committees of poor and disenfranchised lead the decision and policy-making and where knowledges of struggle become more important than “alternative facts”; a reality in which our sense of self does not become destabilized but rather anchored through an exchange of our experiences of embodied struggle.uggles, knowledge-based struggles, struggles for commons, struggles against displacement, and radical care practices; a reality where committees of poor and disenfranchised lead the decision and policy-making and where knowledges of struggle become more important than “alternative facts”; a reality in which our sense of self does not become destabilized but rather anchored through an exchange of our experiences of embodied struggle. In a time when a constantly turbulent news cycle makes it more and more difficult to focus and to understand what is taking place around us, let us instead comprise a map of the nodes of past successes and failures, of our embodied and experiential knowledges, for revisiting and developing strategies of struggle in the present-day.”