The Good Life

desiring the future anew

Spanning two days, this participative conference proposed a collective learning and reflection process to tackle the following question: ‘Given the current ecological, social and political situation we live in, what Good Lives does it make sense to desire today? ’

The conference addressed a mixed audience of artists, cultural operators, researchers and students. It followed a three part trajectory, aiming at connecting the dots between rational awareness of the present and affective disposition towards the future.

I. Re-imagining the present – How do we inhabit this planet?

The first part of the conference aimed at sketching a realistic and tangible portrait of the present ecological situation. The objective was to reveal and deconstruct false hopes, and to identify pathways most likely to actually help us out of our current predicament. Three keynote speakers provided three complementary readings of the issue: through a biophysical lense, a cultural and decolonial lense, as well as through the lense of economics and adaptation.

• Matteo Razzanelli (BE): Better than yeast? – Energy, civilisation & limits

• Malcom Ferdinand (FR): Colonial dwelling and ecological crisis

• Agnès Sinai (FR): In the face of the catastrophe of the Anthropocene: resistance, resilience & degrowth

II. Coming back to life

The second part of the conference was devoted to the mourning of the hopes and desires which the reality of the current ecological, social and political situation no longer allows us to sustain, and to the need of leaving them behind to make way for new ways of imagining our futures and to living our present.

• Martina Petrovic, with Noy Despoina Grigoriadou, Prisca Agnes Nishim-we, Renata Turkeš: The Last Straw — a ritual for turning over a new leaf
• Isabelle Stengers & Benedikte Zitouni (BE): re-inhabiting the present

III. To desire the Future anew

The third part of the conference was dedicated to envisioning the future. After the presentation of two inspirational initiatives, an exercise of futurology engaged the participants in a collective work session to sketch out visions for the future that would be in line with our knowledge of the present.

— Opening up the field of possibilities – two viable alternatives:

• Romain Gauthier (BE): L’Écolieu de l’Orneau
• Kris Dedecker (ES): Low Tech Solutions

— A futurology of desire: a workshop conceived by Maja Kuzmanovic & Ingrid Vranken, facilitated by Ingrid Vranken & Sarah Magnan (FOAM) (BE)

Curatorial statement:

Realistic imaginaries

The disastrous impact of the lifestyles of our thermo-industrial societies on the ecosystems on which they depend has been studied and known for half a century. With the acceleration of the perceptible deleterious effects on our environment, the question of ecological urgency, even if it is still mainly understood as being limited to a climate crisis, has become more widespread among the general public over the last decade.

However, the causes (obvious though they are), the state of advancement (visible though it is) and the profoundly systemic nature of this planetary catastrophe seem to have been sidestepped by the powers that be and the vast majority of the population in favour of an alternative narrative protecting us from a fundamental rethink of our lifestyles, rather than from the dangers of the ecological collapse underway.

The vast majority of our societies live in a fictitious present, alienated from their earthly material realities. We produce, consume and make decisions as if we lived on another planet; we imagine a future for a world that does not exist. For in reality, we have tangible evidence that our ecological, social and economic situation is much worse than we think and that many of the things we pin our hopes on are part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

By imagining the future, we can hope for and desire everything that our fantasy allows us to picture. We can believe in whatever we are capable of telling ourselves as a society. When we try to form an image of what a ‘Good Life’ would be like in the future, we give meaning to the present and we provide direction for our choices. But many of the promises we make to ourselves in the intimacy of our individual desires are simply unattainable, because they are part of a modernist narrative of progress that has lost touch with reality. We are therefore moving towards a world that is simply impossible, or worse, one whose realisation would mean destroying our very conditions of survival.

Keeping this type of ideal alive, the future will only seem darker and darker, because it can only be populated by castrations and deprivations. By stubbornly striving towards these unrealistic ideals, we compromise the possibility of developing alternatives a little more each day. New narratives need thus to be developed that are in tune with the reality of our situation on Earth. We need to imagine and discover what the ‘Good Life’ might be that we can reasonably allow ourselves to desire, and above all, we need to learn to desire this perspective, if we are to have any chance of seeing it come true.

To do this, one must first of all face up to the harsh reality of the present. To understand the ecological collapse that is underway and, above all, accept the range of possibilities that our present allows us to sketch out for the future. This done, once a rational and realistic framework of our situation on earth has been redefined, once our old desires have been relegated to the status of confabulations, what are we left with? Are we capable of habiting this new world? To do so, it would first need to be repopulated with viable desires. We need to put our feet back on the ground to restore our imagination’s capacity to exert traction and to actually transform the present.

Art and artists play a fundamental role in creating images, shaping imaginations and producing desires. How can this work be inscribed in the reality of ecological collapse? How can we, as artists, help to create futures that are worth longing for?

concept & curation: Christophe Meierhans, 2020
commission & production: CIFAS
The Good Life took place during the Urban Academy 2020, on 25 & 26 September at La Bellonne, Brussels