Future 14B

“Capital’s economic science fictions cannot simply be opposed; they need to be countered by economic science fictions that can exert pressure on capital’s current monopolisation of possible realities.” Mark Fisher in the introduction to Economic Science Fictions

Future 14b is a live laboratory and experiment co-created by a transdisciplinary group of researchers, performers, designers and activists whose aim is to conceive, debate, explore, (pre)experience and ultimately performatively realise (some of the) possible futures.

In their meetings, the creative team has used prototyping to gradually form speculative artefacts and situations, which will inhabit the Creative Lab Krater, an abandoned construction site in the centre of Ljubljana, as an interactive performance in progress. Visitors will be able to enter a different, radical and real‑utopian future and actively co-create it in their cultures, economies and political procedures based on the principles of interspecies justice, (eco)feminism and degrowth. However, the performances – which will take place in January, as part of the YUFU Cycle, and in spring 2024 – do not represent a conclusion, but rather a beginning, because, according to the authors, the moment has come to reclaim both the narratives of possible futures and the importance of public participation in their interrogation and co-creation. The aim of the project and the group is to establish – through concrete, yet still experimental manifestations – a space for the social transcendence of capitalist realism; that is, a space and a social laboratory for the production of what Mark Fisher calls effective virtualities – fictions that not only anticipate the post-capitalist future, but that can already start to bring it into being.