A Vocabulary for the Future
What words do we need for thinking about the future? Do they serve ideas and concepts of the past or must we create new ones to name another possible world? Where will we find these words that have not yet been spoken?
Present
Fina Birulés, Lorena Fuster and Lur Olaizola
It’s the name of the current moment and the adjective that applies to what appears in the here and now. But it is also a gift, an offering. In this inhospitable period, the present is, perhaps more than ever, the time suspended between a now and a later, between our grief for the past ...
Desire
Najat El Hachmi and Julia Parks
What if desire wasn’t the expression of a lack? What if the object of our desire wasn’t an object but an aggregate? What if what we desired wasn’t a person but all the moments that make them up, all the things they’ve read, all the places that live inside them? Producing something by desiring, manufacturing a unique world, a composition of elements coming together.
Foolishness
Borja Bagunyà and Rémy Bazerque
Foolishness is a pointed form of obsession, covered in sharp edges: it persists in the power of a drift and a delay. It is a political postponement―and a killjoy―of instant gratification. It is the opposite of personal branding and inflated egos. Foolishness aspires to impersonality: it ...
Intimacy
Llucia Ramis and Nosa Eke
To what extent has our intimacy become a commodity? Where is the outsized exaltation of subjectivity leading us? Why do we talk about oversharing intimacy? Does the unlimited circulation of information threaten our intimacy? There are a growing number of media outlets for exhibiting our private lives; a transformation of subjectivities and new forms of being and being in the world are emerging.
To I
Miquel de Palol and Graeme Arnfield
What is the meaning of "I'ing" and what is its purpose? The question runs parallel to what human beings have been asking ourselves since the beginning of our time as a species: what is the reason for our existence? What have we come to do in this life? Text and voice: Miquel de Palol Score and Edit by: Graeme Arnfield Images: Fukushima Contaminated Water Posted by: Nowi See/TEPCO Dual Light: Tracking a dog at night with FLIR/THERMAL in Kyrgyzstan.
Origin
Muriel Villanueva and Ezra Myers
Coming from a nothingness, from a round seed that contained everything, that would encompass everything but was non-existence; we are the product of a failed origin but with a rudder, an overflowing zero.
Party
Pol Guasch and Noémi Varga
It’s a party. And you’re dancing, with your retinas burning, because a party is a different kind of time, with no past, present, or future; time as a mass, a light, a heartbeat, and their arms getting lost in your arms. With a burning tongue and with their eyes, that have made you ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:...
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 ...
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: ...
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, ...