How dare you maintain hopeful visions in times like these?
Is hope a privilege? Or is hope a muscle, a practice, a ritual or a discipline? An axe, a tactic or a strategy? A distraction, a tangent, an excuse? We take an old saying and modify it to remind ourselves that;
I hear futures and I forget.
I see futures and I remember.
I do futures and I understand.
We dare to maintain because we dare to do, and when we do, we come to understanding.
Simple questions are often the best ones. We have been thinking about this one for over two years already and it is still productive.
We know this question has no answer. But it has many responses. One of ours is:
I hear futures and I forget.
I see futures and I remember.
I do futures and I understand.
Some other responses might be found nearby. Some of these you will have yourself. Some of them will come about because people thought and acted “as if” the world was already changed. Some of the responses emerge to contradict what we thought we all knew.
The questioner aimed the question at us and our work. We felt defensive for a moment, provoked, criticized. Despondency and dejection do not show a lack of intelligence. Nor do action and hope. Grief, anxiety, creativity, doubt, resilience and activity are all valid reactions to the many-sided crisis.
There is much to do. We need volition, understanding, choice and agency to deal with this volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous world.
Bio
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Time’s Up
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Time’s Up builds playgrounds that encourage playful “what if?” exploratory thinking, a form of embedded curiosity. Whether immersive installations, discursive workshops or acoustic experiments, Time’s Up invites audiences, visitors and participants to playfully explore with us the way that the world could be, embedded in speculative situations of experiential futures, using somatic, narrative and rational intelligences to create future care.
Credits
Time’s Up is supported by Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport BMKOES, Linz Kultur, Kulturland OÖ, LinzAG.
Presented in the context of the European Digital Deal project. European Digital Deal is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport.
Photo Credits:CC-BY-SA 4.0 Time’s Up
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