Future Fields
[ 28 min ]
23:59 August 24
Future Fields was a six-week course I gave in the autumn of 2023 at BEAR / ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, with guests such as Muge Yilmaz and Four Siblings project (1).
In the course, my students investigated possible future ecologies, communities, or ways of life on earth from a more-than-human perspective. When we consider the effects of climate change, new relations with the land and new ways of living are immanent. Speculative futures are needed. From macro to micro, from big dreams to significant details; when we think about the possibility of designing the future, what should we consider? What should we be mindful of? How can we be critical? What do we want? How do we do it?
Inspired by the idea of "field building", we considered art making, filmmaking, writing, speeches, proposals, story-telling and rituals as tools to create the future. We contemplated how we to be more mindful of the worlds we make in our fictions and propositions. Because if our work is truly creating a magical forcefield of probability that helps sprout possible futures, then how do we ‘manifest’ critically? And for whom?
We also looked at soil, to ground our ideas in locality, in our bodies, into connection with the Earth and the more-than-human world. We will listen to the land and question what new languages and practices of care and relationship are required to create an abundant earthly kinship with the earth.
Below follows the (con)textual and poetic frameworks for this community course on land, magic and future making, and my magical theory of Future Fields.
Let's begin.
low hum sound
*crickets*
1. Field-Building
Many years ago, I found myself at a Peace Research University called Tamera, near the town of Odemira, Portugal. It was essentially a 150-people community thriving on bio-gas and solar-panels from China, who practice forms of conscious polyamory, and consult rats and wild boars for insights.
A truly curious place.
On my arrival day, the World Council of Global Peace was just commencing in a large straw-bale and wood building.
Overlooking the panorama on the terra-formed landscape, the water retention lakes and wild horses that wave their tails from left to right and up and down, I felt soothed.
It was in this rural community in central Portugal where I first encountered the idea of “Field Building”, although it quickly conglomerated with a string of my earlier experiences of magical and ritual practices.
The Council conveyed the idea that television and newspaper reporting on what is happening “in the world” function as a type of information-glue that not only re-produces "facts" but instead fabricates them, knowingly or unknowingly, binding and shaping what we can believe to be true. The stories in the world news, and the way they are constructed, shape people’s ability to conceive/see the world.
During the last 9 months, most of us have become aware of the rampant lies and the skewed framing through which Western media report on the world. A lot of folx already knew this for decades of course. Ultimately, the framing or creation of a worldview or "narrative" also seems to reinforce that story unto the real world in a peculiar reciprocal form of magic.
Be in through the news, through fiction, through self-inquiring meditations based on the idea that whenever a person or a group of people visualize or imagine something with detail, the probability it becoming a reality is greatly enhanced. As said, we see this in politics, fake news, emancipatory social movements, but also through cultural productions that help society re-think and imagine relationships with the world.
Looking at the worldbuilding of right-wing politicians and conspiracy-hooked folx doped-up by Facebook algorithms, it becomes clear that throwing a story into the world often enables that myth to become more real.
But we also do this through speculative writing, film making and computer games for example, where makers go to great lengths to invent (new) worlds complete with histories, eco-systems, and innovations. We see this mostly in sci-fi and fantasy work, and in art. Usually though, the fictions we make are full of doom and horrors. I get it, we have to process stuff. But we do end up depicting the things we DON’T want, to raise awareness.
Not surprisingly, some of our doom stories seem to become scripts for the future.
It looks like humanity has a very hard time to imagine the future(s) we DO want.
But we are getting better at it.
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2. Inner Image
For quite a while, I’ve been contemplating the theory that science-fiction (and all other fiction) in away updates and uploads information to “an invisible field of probability” which influences the potentiality of (human) development. While I do not know if it is true, the idea intrigues me.
I wrote about it in my application for a Speculative Fiction Writing course at Other Futures in Amsterdam in 2020. I mentioned that there is an idea of an invisible field that influences things, propagated by Rupert Sheldrake, an English author, and researcher in the field of parapsychology, who proposed the concept of Morphic Resonance – a proposition that lacks mainstream acceptance and has been characterized as pseudoscience.
Side note: I met Muge Yilmaz at this speculative writing course. But, back to the theory.
The precept of Morphic Resonance, or Invisible Fields explains that individual species (singular) are connected by an invisible information bridge that spans the entire species (group). This bridge enables members to update a shared collective field, and in return this field shapes the members as well. Sheldrake notably researched rats on different locations on the planet, each group had to run through a maze, and each time a group of rats figured it out, somewhere else on the globe the rats suddenly seemed to know their way through the maze as well.
This theory was extrapolated at the Tamera community to imply that humans also share an invisible collective field of information that influences our behavior.
Suddenly notions of Buddhist monks in prayer flashed in front of my third eye. Witchcraft, ritual and talismans.
In the research community of Tamera, it is believed that whenever groups of people gather and tune into a shared inner-image, this image has a greater potentiality of becoming real. This inner image is not a mere imagination, but a somatically and experienced form of data, intentionally “uploaded” into the collective field.
The notion that we can influence, if not create reality via a sculpted model or representation of it is a precept that can be traced in many cosmologies. The idea of a idol or totem or symbolic representation of something larger that we can cast influence upon forms the baseline in various forms of revival paganism, witchcraft, New Age philosophies and of course; alchemy.
Magic has been around on the earth for a long time. In my graduation project and thesis from the Piet Zwart Institute in 2013 I worked on a research of queer rituals and witchcraft inspired by the Sigil Making practice of the late Genesis Breyer P-orridge, whom I attended a workshop from in PS1, New York a the time.
Sigils are personal magical symbols composed from shapes of letters and other symbols, forming a new sort of monogram. Via a ritual practice then, one would charge this symbol, a talisman of affluence on the world.
The use of symbols for magical or cultic purposes has of course been widespread since at least the Neolithic era. Early forms of writing (if not all forms of writing) came from basis of marking things down to communicate, to charm, to capture, conjure or ensnare in ways.
When looking at the idea of Field Building, we can substitute the symbol of the SIGIL with a different kind of image, that is, an “inner image”. Not so much a symbol, but rather a vision that we imbue power by believing in it, by seeing it.
3. Planting Seeds
Most of us can feels the difference between the utopic dream that is utterly fantastical and unrooted, and a vision that is rooted in experience, detailed, nuanced, and delivered by a person with the merit to know what they are talking about. It has a certain gravitas.
It requires us to have a double-gift, a sixth sense that on the one hand relates to being connected with the ground (the multi-species assemblage of the planet, its politics, and realities) while on the other hand having a veracious eye capable of peeking beyond the limitations of our contemporary (Western) way of life on earth.
Focus, see, shape.
In Octavia E. Butlers Parable of the Sower (1993), a story taking place in California, main character Olamina develops the faith of Earthseed: a community-based fictional religion centered on the idea that "God is Change" (yes, this is a story being created inside a novel).
Events in the story cause Olamina to leave the compounds of her early childhood, and sets her off to trek across the dystopian terrain towards what is to become her first community enclave: Acorn. Against the aghast reality of near-future USA, the central idea of the Earthseed belief is God's malleability.
“Why is the universe?
To shape God.
Why is God?
To shape the universe.”
Parable of the Sower, 1993
Octavia E. Butler
Through shaping God, the people living a dystopic world can save themselves, alter the way things develop, and help them discover their own power and influence on the universe. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well.
And not only in fiction does it not end well.
Visionary fiction aside, it’s fair to say that we live in a world where virtually every decision is pre-made by someone who ran their blood through life before you did.
I understand the desire for co-authorship.
Waking up in someone else’s dream has a yucky feeling to it. Intersecting factors of marginalization, representation and lack of access can further taint that yuck towards the inhumane.
We are living inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. - adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy. 2017
We are in a world where bands of white corporate wankers determine which neighborhood gets a park (2), who gets the tax-discount, the freebees, the unlimited access, and which primal woodland is about to get AI-mapped for optimal oil extraction or fracking (3), we are indeed prompted into the necessity of co-authoring reality, for our very lives and that of the larger community-of-all-beings depends on it.
In a way this is what Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth from Genesis P'orridge (4) was after: co-authorship of reality and redistribution of power in a state system that wasn’t fair to (at the time) punkers.
To focus thee Will on one's true desires, in thee belief, gathered from experience that this maximises and makes happen all those things that one wants in every area ov life. (5)
Isn't this also what Tamera is after? The reshaping of how we live with the land and with each other – isn’t this what eco-activists are after? What artists long for? Alternative structures of labor, income, expression, living together, seeing anew and deeper, and with more beauty?
Then why is so much art in the world a mere reproduction of the violence it seeks to counter?
Why are so many sci-fi movies -meant to warn for dystopia- literal handbooks for corporate take-over? I mean take the story of Parable of the Sower for example, and how that script is being played out as we speak.
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4. Good or Bad Pulp?
Beliefs, stories, Sci-Fi and other fiction influences reality. This has always been clear to me. Artists who sculpt film or story can tap into the collective unconsciousness and shape/download/call into being visions of the 'Future' – entire worlds awaiting to be unraveled, first as story, then as cosmology, then as science and then as world.
Unfortunately, most story-braiders and entertainment-crafters aren’t often inclined to develop narratives of peaceful co-existence. As said before, violence and war seem to be what sells, as if its simply more plausible and real than the cessation of such things.
Even in Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation (2017) most contributions rely heavily on techno-futuristic doom scenarios to make a point, instead of deeply integrating land-based lore and belonging that would render such tropes as obsolete.
In The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) by Starhawk things go otherwise. Taking place in California as well, diametric developments take place in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Whereas one turns into a green utopia where the streets are opened up to make way for gardens while a visionary council of all beings is consulted for decisions, the other becomes a brittle hellscape where folx work all day to be paid in pharmaceutical medication rations that help suppress the many (mortal) ailments in a brittle and dry world where only billionaires can afford bathing and fresh water.
Sounds familiar?
As a novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing successfully utilized the possibility of doom to help hinge a reader into getting excited and inspired sensing about what is possible.
Spoiler alert: it ends well.
One detail always stuck with me from this book, namely that most characters are bisexual. But also that in the attic of main character Maya Greenwood, there is a room; a room for rituals. Yet this room is also the room for lovemaking. It is here where some of the wonderful intimate moments transpire between a handful of the cast, as they retire to love and sexuality as one of many forms of inhabiting life in the wonderful polis of their Ecotopia.
In my own life, the polyamorous ritual love-room in the attic of our house awakes something that is both deep and archaic, as it is political.
5. Politics of Pleasure
Adrienne Maree Brown, a writer, activist and facilitator working in the field of postnationalism, Black feminism or womanism, wrote the books Pleasure Activism, and Emergent Stategy.
She argues that we must prioritize pleasure in our lives, wherein pleasure can help us tap 'into the potential goodness in each of us, to generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists".
In her book, liberation around gender, kinky desires and sexual arousals leads to a de-colonization and re-ownership of our bodies and lives. "[...]pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy," she says.
It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction. [...] visionary fiction is a way to practice the future in our minds, alone and together.
- adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy. 2017
Unweaving and reweaving.
To me, pleasure as a remedy for the otherwise unpleasant sparks political grit.
It speaks volumes about who we are as a human culture when the idea of pleasure as politically vital raises our eyebrows. (6)
In 2017 I organized the project LOVE SPACE. it was a temporary Temple of Love that functions as a community centre. Here, people could gain awareness of their sexuality, eroticism and partnership(s), in a safe and communaal way.
What struck me was the people who actually joined had an alltogether transofrmative experince, while the people looking at the idea of sex and pleasure as something potential or communally of benfit was something to be questioned.
See, sex and love have always been allowed to be vulgar, funny, romantic and/or disastrous, but a tool for political change? No, that's way too hippie.
Well guess again.
You'll be surprised how many very normal nearly daily things ring politically. Things of the body we often take for granted or turn profane.
Take naps, for example.
Tricia Hersey, the American poet, minister, performance artist, and activist who founded The Nap Ministry can tell you about this.
She wrote a book that teaches us that rest is resistance, that it is revolution, that it is a right. Idea's that seem soft and cute until you realize the roots of this thinking. The fact that some people, in this case historic enslaved black people, did not have the opportunity to rest because of morbid designs deployed by their owners and traders.
Hersey pulls a string from that gruesome reality and ties it to our modern day capitalist grind culture, in which so many work themselves to death, literally.
Naps are more political than often imagined.
I’ll gladly spare you from fleshing out on the morbid history of rest, though it might help you sense its virtue and grace more deeply.
Why does contrast work so well? Why does that which we really don’t want often midwife that which we do want?
Like why is it that the things we seek in a revolution or a revolt are always in a process of growing up against some super structure? I mean, we might think we seek to overthrow the system, but how much of our revolutionary motivation and drive in a way needs that system? It's perplexing to imagine that we somehow might not be able to get down to live the lives we want to live when the system is eventually overthrown.
It reminds me of Erich Fromm, a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst and humanistic philosopher, who studied the human condition and wrote about our apparent Fear of Freedom; how we somehow subconsciously seek to react or revolt or go-against (he calls this "freedom from", or the negative freedom) rather than being able to really be free, that meaning without a springboard or contrast to fight against (he calls this "freedom to", or the positive freedom) - it would almost be like an art of life, an art of living, rather than one of surviving. (7)
His theory of the human condition begins with the insight that freedom itself can sometimes be the cause of fear and anxiety, forcing us to find ways to “escape from freedom”, rather than wielding it fully.
It reminds me of modern workweeks full of labor with some holiday and reprise here and there, while formerly our years were fully formed by myriad motley festivities of worship for this or that goddess, dancing while we worked the fields. (8)
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6. Common Dreams?
It is clear to me that the stories we produce influence what we collectively believe to be possible.
That what we put our attention towards exceedingly manifests.
The stories we share, are told, and create, write themselves like lines of ink into our imagination and our bloodstream. They form a consensus reality which we live inside of, unbeknownst of the creation that we’ve made. According to Genesis P-Orridge, consensus reality is 'an amalgamation of approximate recordings from flawed biomachines' (9), meaning that we create what is real together, while we’ve also been quite misguided creators.
In a way we are bio-machines, unperfect and in a state of becoming and remembering that we’ve not always been capitalists.
Prior to the 16th century, much of the land in England was in fact collectively owned and managed by people living in the respective locale. These lands, known as “Commons”, were accessible to all members of a society. Commons were understood as shared spaces that groups of people managed for individual and collective benefit.
These spaces naturally involved a variety of informal norms and values (social practice, folk customs, traditions, local lore, etc.) employed for governmental and cultural conduct. Commons can best be seen as a (land-based) social practice in which a community takes care of a land and its capacity to provide sustenance and livelihood. That is: not the state, and not the market!
So, can we take a second to realize that less than 500-years ago the land was still a common good, before it was taken by the Aristocracy, who would use it for full-time cattle farms and otherwise vast-empty inaccessible private estates.
Not so very long ago, we had so many ways of living that functioned well without Clicktunnels, off-shore banking loopholes, drop-shipping and growth-hacks such as hiring Indonesian kids to do your work while you parade at some Silicon Valley banquet.
We’ve certainly made some odd progress over the last couple centuries, haven’t we?
So much so, that we almost can't imagine what things were like or can be like.
Why is it though, that even in the attempt to write about Future Fields it is so effervescently easier to emphasize what we don’t want, and who is the culprit, as opposed to leading you into the visions of what we do want? Into the polyamorous love-making ritual room?
Well?
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7. Keeping it real
Across the terrain of the Tamera community, many vernacular buildings perch on hill slopes. These are Love Spaces - the ones I based my 2017 project on. There is one residing in the nook of the roof above the main straw bale aula, and many more are found in different areas of the community. Small rooms, sometimes wall-less, wherein community members agree to meet to share physicality in between or after the day’s work is done.
I had never been at a place before where over lunch a colleague openly invites another for some lovemaking before returning to work.
The notion of a space for lovemaking, untangled from scripts of clubs, bars, drinks and dating, but void of dark crevices of chem-sex anonymity sparked great joy within me.
It is Starhawks ritual room materialized.
Of course, this is not everyone’s dream.
Which brings me to a central point: we must never set out to organize one single form of Future Fields.
We should never consider that one central idea or system will accommodate the needs of everyone.
Nature, the world, us, everything in truth shouts at us how diverse and queer it really is.
Queer as in at odds with what is considered normal. Queer as in differentiated from what is mapped and plotted versus the unfathomable beauty of the real.
The state of trance we get in when we tune into the hissing bliss of Cicadas, or the tingling waves that lick at the ocean front in Portugal, creating a froth light enough for lift off but still able to carry us on a warm summer's evening.
In truth, what we want is very specific.
What we want, and what we need, is an art of nuance compared to the blunt and big of what sits wrongly in our ways of living.
At least this is what I teach my students.
Like this text you've been reading, we might start with a list of all the gruesome things that are wrong with the world, only to end up with spinning the threads of the smallest details of a large tapestry of a re-worked world.
These details are like the fibers.
The three Moirai of Greek Mythology will tell us all we need to know about the power of finely worked threads.
In the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (10), Ursula le Guin speaks strikingly about the appreciation of small things. In her writing (which I highly recommend!) she proposes a theory of why we got so obsessed with “big, long, and hard things meant for bashing”, while at the same time she ensnares a reader into seeing the magic of the countless hands at work in myriad small deeds that in repetitive actions that make any big and intense deep possible
The matrix of the everyday, where there is “time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over”.
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8. Future Fields
All I can say is that Future Fields is a spell.
Its ingredients are details, nuances, knowledge, skills, inspiration, vision, and specificity.
It has a Queer tang to it.
Future Fields is invisible architecture.
Yet it is not universal.
They are multiple, pluriform.
Future Fields is a prayer.
It is an access ramp.
It is an organ, a tool, a method.
It is temporal perhaps.
(it has to be)
Perhaps delusional, mad even.
(but yielding results nonetheless)
It is a peeking beyond.
Since ancient days, we've shaped the world this way; via stories, magical tellings, and ceremonies.
Abracadabra.
No matter how you turn it around, we are bound to reality and each other via the stories we tell, Le Guin can tell you more about it too.
Be it folklore, be it racism, be it mindfulness. From our earliest education to great books, from the way a city is designed to the way we access our bodies in exquisite lovemaking: we are alive by and inside of the stories made by ancestors and uttered by the forces of geology and the other-than-human agencies.
Working consciously with Future Fields awakens the awareness that our decisions, designs, and visions matter.
They are all ingredients in the potion of the future, and like pagan herbalists we midwife the next by our agile herbcraft.
We must understand that our words and our art are spells casted unto our audiences and peers, and ultimately unto ourselves. Though they might not contain symbols such as Sigils, their creation, materialization, visualization, and presentations affect our consciousness and our imagination like acupressure points helping to rush blood to certain spots and organs.
Immaterially, Future Fields is an ‘information’ field that lies beyond the physical, but which in turn strongly influences the physical.
Think of elven beings helping a flower blossom while it allocates slots on rocks for moss to grow.
Or perhaps you’re fantasy needs some space-tech? Well so be it!
Future Fields is the large and bright light-arched info-field that spans the entire planet, the matrix of cosmic magnetism engineered by ancient geology that we access through the secret nodes installed in our bones.
Future Fields points to the malleable cultural goggle in front of our eyes.
Yes: it’s that thing that keeps shifting as new generations speak out and define themselves with greater specificity. Future Fields is the departure from which all things creative can gush forth.
Do you feel it?
It’s in your hands too.
Working with Future Fields, I ask to orient our magic at this departure point itself: to shape it!
The lens; the goggle; the seed; the field of dreams.
Forgive my centric thinking here, of course there are many departure points, departure nexuses, vortexes, matrixes and boggy murky swamp lands where things grow and die in potent succession.
Future Fields is not merely a seed; it is the very place that seeds go to grow! It is the nursery in which saplings stretch.
Field, in this sense, relates to the very material below our feet: it is one of our oldest forms of agriculture; the soil and space for things to grow; a vastly entangled space that knows no defined borders. A zone that dances in the margins of itself.
It is recycled meaning and material forming the base for more.
It is a place on the earth where things happen; a field where we can be, and meet, run, play, and feel the wind speak to us.
Bayo Akomolafe calls this ‘the next’ -> the emergent reality that will appear or emerge out of this one via our actions and in-actions. And dare I say the actions and in-actions of the more-than-human too. They too have a say in the play.
As makers, as artists, we are caretakers of this field of the now and the next.
What we will to be, and what we make, prepares, and repairs, the soil of Future Fields, for generations to come.
9. So where do we land?
In Future Fields.
There we explore together what could be a probable abundant and peaceful future life on the earth.
I mean, that is what we did in the autumn months of 2023. Over six weeks of reading, writing speculative fictions, generating proposals and fragments of the world we could create together.
We had walks too, towards a local herb garden, shaped like a wheel of the year. Four main directions and four smaller ones. We spoke of field building in a shamanic sense, of invoking the corners and embodying spring, summer, fall and winter.
We voiced the wind, and trees and saplings. We danced as a way of speaking. We send our grief and prayers towards the river that crosses the city of Arnhem.
The Rhine.
We read about the Grammar of Animism by Robin Wall Kimmerer. But we also took our thinking onto the land with our hands and feet and bodies, when we had excursions at the Four Siblings project in Amsterdam West.
Here we listened to the land, and explore what new languages and practices of care are required to (re)weave earthly kinship.
In a form of Earth magic, we built a compost heap together, in which we planted our intentions and seeds for the future, knowing very well that seeds only grow in proper soil.(11)
So that is what we did: creating soil, in terms of understanding, in seeing, but also with shovels and hands and layers of compost and manure, intermixed with wood chips and dry leaves. We stirred this together with our energy, we circled the heap and sang. Sealing the spell with green leaves and flowers.
But the rituals on the land were not the only test. Back in the school, the students -some by themselves, some in coalitions- began to present and materialize their visions of their Future Fields in critical and creative ways. Central to their proposal(s) for future(s) was the ongoing relationship with ‘natural’ environment; plants, animals, rocks, more-than-human and perhaps even unseen beings.
They investigated the meaning of ‘nature’ and how its colonial origins have created false dichotomies and power-structures. They looked at how a Queering of the world and of ‘nature’ brought about new avenues of thought or development.
After all the reading and discussing and rummaging with the land come the materials, the crafting, the making.This is sometimes the most exciting part, but it is also often the most difficult.
But there is no perfect. No need for perfect. The central idea of my module is to become aware of the sensibilities of operating in a world where everything we set in motion can grow into the next thing.
Let’s call Future Fields a creative experiment. A design methodology. A practice, if you will.
In short, Future Fields is a playful and visionary journey that investigates possibilities just beyond the brink of our current horizon by taking a step into the imagination and towards the speculation of visionary worldviews. And who knows, perhaps our speculations form a magical concoction which can sprout into our reality sooner than we think.
XOXO
Venus
—
Afterthought
I want to underscore that the linear notion of time from past to future, and more problematically from "underdeveloped" to "developed", is not universally applied by the many communities alive on earth. Reasonings that render ancient ways as primitive as opposed to high-techno-culture makes me yuck. Time is cyclical. Time is weird. Heck, it fluctuates in each given week for me so much. So don’t come at me with linear ideology. Yet still, the "future" in Future Fields has a ring to it. If you’d want to you could tune into it, hear it sing like the rings of Saturn. But wait, you’re an actant in this orchestra, a tube-y hollowed bone in sync. You must sing to hear it ring. Got it?
Footnotes
(1) A similar course was called Community of All Beings and was taught by me at the Ecology Futures MA in Den Bosch in 2021 to 2022.
(2) Nature Is A Human Right: Why We're Fighting for Green in a Grey World.2022, Ellen Miles. Published by Penguin Random House, UK.
(3) Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence. 2022, James Bridle. Farrar,Straus and Giroux.
(4) Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, abbreviated as TOPY, was a British magical organization, fellowship and chaos magic network founded in 1981 by Genesis P-Orridge, lead member of multimedia group Psychic TV, a loosely federated organization of members and initiates operating as an order of ceremonial magic and sex magic, as well as an experimental artistic collective.
(5) See: https://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/topy/topymani.htm
(6) In the summer of 2017, I created the project LOVE SPACE in Amsterdam a temporary Temple of Love that functions as a community centre. Here, people could gain a deeper awareness of sexuality, eroticism and partnership. LOVE SPACE was an attempt to link the personal and private with the public and political, an intimate place free of voyeurism or exhibitionism. Focal points were safety and connection with our human sexuality. People came and stayed for several nights. Others wrote skeptical reviews without participating. Retrospectively, this project was also a Future Fields.
(7) Fear of Freedom, or Escape from Freedom, by Erich Fromm, 1941. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Freedom
(8) See, TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) by Hakim Bey, 1991. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone
(9) From "Magick Squares and Future Beats." Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult. The Disinformation Company, 2003.
(10) See text here: https://otherfutures.nl/uploads/documents/le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction.pdf
(11) I've also done a similar form of soil/compost making imbued with future spell casting at Mu Hybrid Art House Eindhoven during the Earth Fungus Blessing event in 2022, and later that year also at the Earth Craft Symposium, as part of the KABK Studium Generale, under the name of Future Soils.
Images
Images are all from the course I gave at ArtEZ.
Keywords: Speculative futurisms. Land-Based Belonging. Land-Based Skills. Soil Futures. Community of All Beings. Critical Research. Visioning. Questioning. Animism. Non-Western Ontologies. Storytelling. More-than-Human. Queerness. Invoking. Play, Ritual & Magic.
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