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A Vocabulary for the Future

Continuous screening

Care

Lisa Appignanesi and Neus Ballús

An audiovisual work created by the writer Lisa Appignanesi and the film director Neus Ballús which is part of the project “A Vocabulary for the Future”. Attention, if you pause to think, is not really all that far from love. What is it to hold someone dear but to be attentive ...

Silence

Sophie Collins and Raimon Fransoy

Think about silence and all it implies. But think—now, quickly—about words and meaning. About words and meaning and metaphor. About words and deception. About how metaphor—or any kind of figurative language—might, in fact (and often inadvertently), lead to a kind deception. ...

Light

Irenosen Okojie and Alba G. Corral

I need a future where the concept of light can feel intimate, radical and more expansive. Even contentious. I want trickster light, blinding light, sweet light, ominous light. I want light you can hold, pocket or light that feels like carrying neon sirens in your chest. Light tinged with hallucinatory ...

Eunoe

Marina Warner and Alba Cros Pellisé

Kindness is in short supply, though the pandemic is inspiring more of it than we imagined possible. But generally the strain of wars, climate change, hostile acts of governments and authorities at home and beyond, border walls and other exclusionary measures have made the world a very unkind ...

Relation

Mireia Calafell and Alba Sotorra

Let’s say goodbye to the idea that the world is us, and we are the individuals who occupy, each of us, our own space, let’s make vulnerability a weapon, and make identity a problem, an obligation to create oneself that can never be satisfied, an unending task that we have always done as a group.

Cosirar

Albert Badia and Patricia Tamayo

Cosirar is a seed-word. As the poet and rural veterinarian María Sánchez says, it means dropping by to make sure people, other animals or plants are OK. To find out if they need help or attention. It’s something more than just observing, watching, or reviewing. ...

Home

Albert Badia and Patricia Tamayo

What is a home? What offers us shelter and contains us? For anyone who has had to move, who has been forced to flee, to cross borders and leave their lives behind, what protects them from the elements? Home may not be a physical place, a big house and a garden full of flowers, but words, actions, thoughts.

Dream

Adrià Sunyol

Is there a future without dreams? What does our ability to dream tell us about us? There are people who cross a border hanging on to the bottom of a truck, live on the street of an unknown city, feel deeply alone and helpless, close their eyes and find a way out of where there seems to be nothing.

Repair

Adrià Sunyol

What is the relationship between repairing and understanding? Both verbs indicate a movement towards the other, a movement out of oneself: to observe, to care, to understand that not everything is contained in what we already have or already know. Text and voice: Luís Sound: Pascual Gonz&agr...

Anticipation

José Luís Peixoto and Andrés Duque

When we anticipate what is to come, we seem to be living the future in the present. We are here and, at the same time, we are anticipating what will happen tomorrow: we calculate, we predict, we imagine possibilities. This is a kabbalah that is full of imperfections and yet inevitable. As long ...

Affirmation

Rosi Braidotti and Laida Lertxundi

We live in convulsive, contradictory times that demand of us a new way of being in the world: an ethics of generosity and working together, and recognition of our reciprocal interdependence with all beings, human and non-humans, organic and inorganic, with which we share the planet. Text and voice:...

Border

Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Diana Toucedo

Either side of the border the land is identical. And when there is no physical barrier, it is often difficult for us to imagine one. We might try but all we can see are mountains, rocks, land, scraps of sky, without any division. What do borders separate? Is it possible that, in the future, ...

Normal

Koleka Putuma and Irene Moray

Which is the weight of the past in the present? What is in our hands to change, about how things are today? Is there anything new, extraordinary, about the times we are living in? The words of the young South African poet Koleka Putuma and the images of the filmmaker Irene Moray leave the meaning of the word “normal” on hold.

Future

Drac Màgic

The certainty that the future is also a thing of the present inhabits the reflections of the boys and girls who participate in this collective audiovisual project. Their contributions form an experimental and choral piece that invokes various key concepts for global transformation: community, ...

Legacy

Juan Mayorga and Carolina Astudillo

Is the desire to leave some kind of legacy, or the need to be remembered an exercise in vanity? Does thinking we must leave some legacy, either material or immaterial, lead to a fuller life? Any legacy brings with it an initial commitment, that of embracing it and giving it continuity, or rejecting and ignoring it.

Memory

Yan Lianke, Xisi Sofia Ye Chen and Cadhla Kennedy Ko

What isn’t visible can’t be remembered. This is why our efforts are destined to struggle against oblivion, to create and give shape to things that can be seen and touched tomorrow. Seeing is a kind of testimony, but memories can also be made: the person who manages to model today’s ...

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Poetry

Mircea Cărtărescu, Dostopos and Artur Tort

What is poetry’s way of existing in the world? It isn’t in verses but rather in the fact of parting with the will, effort, the ego, and consciousness. Small aimless and inadvertent gestures can lead to sparks of poetry, a state of grace that surpasses any form of knowledge. Directed by:...

Touch

Karen Barad and Blanca Rego

What happens when two hands touch? How close are they like? And how can proximity be measured, and even more so, in times of a pandemic and distancing? We think we touch things, that we can take other people by the hand, but physics tells us quite another story. Text and voice: ...

Freedom

Raül Garrigasait, Laura Ginès and Pepon Meneses

Can we find a balance between survival and freedom, right now when one seems to be working against the other? Is freedom more valuable than life itself, or are we willing to sacrifice it in exchange for a long, safe, and painless life? We are convinced that it is a temporary renunciation, but there are temporary renunciations that mark a whole epoch.

Refuge

Marta Marín-Dòmine and Carla Simón

Finding refuge, inhabiting it, constructing experience, rediscovering the body there after fleeing. Welcoming the person who flees, compressing differences, making any space possible, diluting barriers that define an identity, and allowing its transformation. Which “us” can we construct ...

Rehearsal

Nona Fernández and Isaki Lacuesta

Can we learn from the errors of the past? Can we rebuild what has previously been broken? When does the future begin? We rehearse, we try, we repeat, we get it wrong, and we try again. Among the ruins and mistakes, day after day, the sun rises once more. We wake up, time and time again, with ...

Species

Stefano Mancuso, Xiana do Teixeiro and Emilio Fonseca

We humans are convinced that we belong to the best, the most developed and complex of all living species.

Nature

Bruno Latour and Gerard Ortín Castellví

Where can we find the border separating what is natural from what is not? Does this border exist? What marks the difference between what we call natural and what we call cultural or human? Culture and nature: there is no way to escape this moral opposition, this inseparable pair which seems to distinguish between what is good and what is bad.