How can participatory art create spaces for reimagining economies, labour, and ecological futures? How do speculative rituals, role-playing, and collective storytelling open cracks in the dominant narratives of extraction, precarity, and crisis? In this session, we begin with a screening of The Feast (2022), a speculative dinner ritual set in a post-fossil fuel future, when humans harness energy created through their metabolism. The dinner guests reflect on the struggles of weaning society off dirty energy. Following the screening, the film’s author Alicja Rogalska will join us for a conversation on this as well as her other collaborative works, which bring together communities, activists, and workers to co-create emancipatory scenarios through workshops, performances, and live-action role-playing. Often translated into video works, her projects explore labour, migration, gender, and care, crafting experimental sites of solidarity and resistance. The discussion will be accompanied by short clips from her other films, including Dreamed Revolution (2016), NOVA (2020) and Terms & Conditions (2024), and concluded with a mini participatory performance in the form of a toast.

Alicja Rogalska is a Polish-British interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin and London and working internationally. Her practice is research-led and focuses on social structures and the political subtext of the everyday; she mostly works in specific contexts making situations, performances, videos and installations in collaboration with other people to collectively search for emancipatory ideas for the future. She recently presented her work at n.b.k. (Berlin, 2024), Biennale Matter of Art (Prague, 2024), Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (2024), Biennial Videobrasil (São Paulo, 2023-24), New Contemporaries (London & Blackpool, 2023-24), Jogja Biennale (Yogyakarta, 2023), Urbane Künste Ruhr (Essen, 2023), Scherben/Berlin Art Prize (2022, main prize), Manifesta 14 Prishtina (2022), Temporary Gallery (2021-22), Kunsthalle Wien (2020-21) and OFF Biennale (2020-21). Rogalska is currently an artist in residence at the Villa Kamogawa / Goethe Institute in Kyoto and a PhD researcher in the Art Department at Goldsmiths College. She was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program in 2020-21, and an artist in residence at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, 2023), Faculty of Social Sciences at Essex University (2019-22), City of Women Festival (Ljubljana, 2019) and The Stuart Hall Library (London, 2019), amongst others.

• Četrtek, 3. april 2025

This talk explores the intersections of performance and speculation as tools for advancing post-capitalist paradigms such as degrowth and the commons, at both local and translocal levels. How can these approaches be leveraged to embody radical alternatives? And how might they intervene in the dominant narratives of the future, which are shaped by those with reality-bending power? Drawing on projects such as the game show Game-Changers: The Game, the living laboratory Future 14B, and the art project The Department for Parallel Economic World(ing)s, among other case studies, we will explore how worldbuilding is emerging across movements – from the resurgence of LARPs and board games to speculative fiction and contemporary art. Through this lens, we will critically explore what new modes and theories of social change these practices offer, and their untapped potential for fostering decentralised “imagination infrastructures” capable of challenging capitalist realism.

Rok Kranjc is a researcher in the fields of political ecology, alternative economies and futures studies. He is also the founder of Futurescraft, a research and development studio that employs futuring, games, and performative methods as tools for collectively imagining, reflecting on, and prefiguring transition pathways aligned with post-capitalist perspectives. Some of his projects include the modular board game and game show Game-Changers: The Game and performance series Future 14B. Rok frequently collaborates with organizations such as Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary ArtLjubljana, Maska Institute, Krater Collective, Crypto Commons Association, P2P Foundation andParticipatory Futures Global Swarm. Rok has (co-)translated several books into his native Slovenian, including Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse, Maarten Hajer’s The Politics of Environmental Discourse and Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons.