Avenir Institute

“The future is certain, it is only the past that is unpredictable". - Soviet anecdote

Histories made out of the Past define the pathways to Futures. How does ‘reality’ of the Present becomes legitimate? History is constructed story, which primary goal is to legitimise the order of today and provide the image of the desired future by the often seemingly anonymous storyteller.

F(r)ictions is a research seminar aimed at the deconstruction of the aesthetic and narrative fabric of history, revelation of the alternative possible futures and building up the speculation as if they had happened. What if Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo or Greeks lost to Persians at Marathon? In this seminar we discover loopholes in the normalised history to identify and elaborate the alternative futures. Borrowing the method ‘symptomatic reading’, introduced by philosopher Louis Althusser, we read the history in order to define aporias and intervene in the details for filling it with the alternative narratives. This critical exercise allows to question the naturalness of the historical narrative and abandon the idea of the fate or inevitable patterns of historical reproduction. Instead, it opens an array of possibilities to analyse the potency of the present to produce multiple visions of futures.

The lectures and workshops in the context of the seminar was presented at Moscow Museum of Oriental Arts (Moscow, RU) and Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL).