On Saturday 17 June at 7pm, author T.J. Demos will present his new book “Radical Futurisms. Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come” (Sternberg Press) at Zabriskie Buchladen.
The presentation is in English and will be moderated by Sina Ribak (Between Us and Nature). Admission is free. Doors open at 6:30 pm.
Please note: As we only have limited capacity in the bookshop, we ask for your understanding that we have to stop admittance in case of large numbers of visitors. In this case, we will attempt a sound transmission outside.
There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. In Radical Futurisms, drawing on visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed—Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist—as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives. He argues that it’s as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as it is to defeat the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance.
How might we decolonize the future, and cultivate an emancipated chronopolitics in relation to an undetermined not-yet? If we are to avoid climate emergency’s cooptation by technofixes, and the defuturing of multitudes by xenophobic eco-fascism, Demos argues, we must cultivate visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.
T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics and ecology. He is Professor in Art History, Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, as well as founder and director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on the intersection of visual culture, radical politics and political ecology, particularly where art, activism and visual culture oppose racial, colonial, and extractive capitalism, and where they work towards social, economic and environmental justice.
https://tjdemos.sites.ucsc.edu/
Sina Ribak is an independent researcher for ecologies and the arts. She is co-founder of the Berlin-based Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club with artist Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, creating a shared public space for collective reading across disciplines, and life forms. Since a decade she is involved in translocal ecosystems (Arts Collaboratory, Green Art Lab Alliance) and collectives aimed at collaboratively shifting paradigms and narratives through gathering, storytelling, trust, sharing, and experimentation.
