Real Utopias, Alternative Futures & Imagining Otherwise

REAL UTOPIAS,
ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
& THE POLITICS OF IMAGINATION

BY KÜBRA GÜMÜŞAY | WRITER & ESSAYIST

THE COLONISATION OF THE FUTURE

After more than a decade of research into various forms of social (in)justice – from racism to sexism to neoliberal (racial) capitalism to poverty –, I have shifted my attention from the deconstruction of the present to the construction of the future. From deconstruction to construction. From analysis to imagination. To what else there could be; to what else there already is. Researching what is emerging.

Because while those marginalised and structurally disadvantaged analyse the present to stay alive, another future is being constructed. While those marginalised are forced to resist the present, the future is being colonised by the privileged. How to bridge this discrepancy?

In my current work, I research desirable, just, alternative futures, past utopias and ‘real utopias' [1] as the sociologist Erik Olin Wright calls them to examine how ideals and ideas of alternatives to capitalism can be put into practise. I have conducted interviews with members, founders and inhabitants of so-called ‘real utopias’ in Uzbekistan, Senegal, Egypt, the US, Turkey, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, the UK and several other European countries (upcoming: Malaysia, Indonesia, Bhutan, South Africa) to seek answers on questions such as to seek answers on questions such as: What can we learn from utopian experiments of the past and real utopias of the present? How and where have they failed, how and where have they succeeded?

My underlying motivation for this research can best be inferred by drawing on the following two quotes which express the discontent I feel with the state of our current political discourse. In 1975, Toni Morrison said:

The function, the very serious function of racism […] is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. […] None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing. [2]

There will always be something else. Another absurdity, another provocation on which intellectuals, scholars, writers, activists and indeed regular citizens, especially those subjected to and objectified by these narratives, expend their lives, instead of simply being. Instead of living their ideals, putting them into practice. Instead of moving on from the analysis and deconstruction of the present, into the imagination and construction of just, desirable futures.

In a 2004 article, the investigative journalist Ron Suskind quotes one of George W. Bush’s political advisers as saying:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality […] we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too […]. We’re history’s actors […] and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. [3]

With public debates on climate, gender or racial injustice often revolving around the very existence of these realities, a significant amount of resources of social justice movements is depleted by the burden of evidence. Meanwhile, this generates a lack of public discourse on alternative, more desirable futures and possible ways of implementation. With little information on how to actually act, speak, consume, interact, love, let alone live a more just life, these debates force individuals into lethargy and fear of mistakes, flaws and wrongdoings and alienation. Justice movements are then not only played off against each other, eventually, they are also misunderstood as drivers of division, when, in fact, they point at the preexisting divisions in our societies. To overcome these constructed boundaries, the study of just alternatives becomes an urgent necessity.

Wright argues that if ‘social and political justice […] [are] to be our future, it will be brought about by the conscious action of people acting collectively to bring it about’ [4]. Once we let go of the notion that ideals have to be realised everywhere at once, we will be free to open up spaces now where we can try out utopias ‘as best we can’, knowing full well that the experiment can only be partially successful [5]. And so, real utopias can turn into spaces in which we can catch a glimpse of alternative, possible futures, spaces from which we can observe and learn from.

[1] Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2010), p. 6.

[2] Toni Morrison, ‘A Humanist View’, from Portland State University’s Oregon Public Speakers Collection, ‘Black Studies Center Public Dialogue, Pt. 2’, 30 May 1975, https://www.mackenzian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Transcript_PortlandState_TMorrison.pdf.

[3] Ron Suskind, ‘Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush’, The New York Times, 17 October 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-andthe-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html.

[4] Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2010), p. 370.

[5] Foucault called such spaces ‘heterotopias’: ‘real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.’ Michel Foucault, ‘Of other spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16(1) (Spring 1986), pp. 22–7 (24).

Lützerath, Germany, January 2023 – taken by Abdulkadir Topal during our visit a few days before the destruction of the village for a coal mine

My current research [which I have conducted in several countries. Scholarships include Fellowship at The New Institute (2023-2024) Mercator Senior Fellowship (2022-2023, University of Cambridge), 2021 Join Politics (for future_s) and Deutsche Kulturakademie »Villa Tarabya« Artist in Residency Fellowship in 2021] aims to tap into this field, by

Exploring through interdisciplinary readings how imaginations of the future impact our reality – individually, politically and culturally.
Conducting interviews with individuals from various social, cultural and political movements pushing for change and visit and observe places, collectives that exist on the fault line between dreams and practice: ‘real utopias'. What is it, that they have in common? How can we train our muscle of imagination, moving from ideals to practise?
And lastly, by developing a prototype for imagination dinners & room for imagination:

Imagination may sound as though these are not the most pressing and necessary actions to be taken in search of desirable futures. However, as bell hooks put it: “What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.” [6] And as Adrienne Maree Brown put it in her book “Emergent Strategy”: “We are in an imagination battle. Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous. And that imagination is so respected that those who kill, based on an imagined, racialized fear of Black people, are rarely held accountable.“ [7]

What are our imaginations of the “new”? In 2020 together with my team at future_s [a feminist research- and advocacy organisation for desirable futures I co-founded in 2020], we ran several backcasting workshops with various marginalised groups to identify desirable futures, search for patterns and allow for new alliances. However, the sheer imagination of a desirable future within which the current systems of oppression have ceased to exist, appeared to be a much bigger obstacle than originally anticipated.

However, imaginations, predictions of and the future itself are constructed and colonised predominantly by individuals not equipped with this knowledge, these experiences, this deep analysis of what is fundamentally wrong today – as it is happening right in this moment of time –, our common future will likely degenerate into a somewhat changed, maybe even slightly improved manifestation of what is fundamentally wrong today.

[6] bell hooks. All about love: new visions. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), p. 14.

[7] adrienne maree brown. „Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. P. 18f

WHY IMAGINE OTHERWISE?

It is then, when we allow ourselves to imagine a different world, that we’ll understand the dystopian absurdity of the now. This is when we’ll take on the courage to do things differently. Dare to use our tools, our power, our knowledge to act differently.

In 1948, the author James Baldwin went into a sort of self-imposed exile in Paris to ‘prevent myself from becoming [. . .] merely a Negro writer’, which would have been his fate in the United States. Much of his work deals with the question of how you can write and speak in a language, and in a society, that reduces the speaker to just one facet of their being – abasing and dehumanising them. English was Baldwin’s mother tongue, yet it was not the language in which he could be:

My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reﬂected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter in quite another way. If the language was not my own, it might be the fault of the language; but it might also be my fault. Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could ﬁnd the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test. [8]

Baldwin adapted English to his own experience. He dared to edit it; not as a guest, but as the owner of the house. And if the construction of this world isn't ours, if these structures don’t allow us to breath, to love, to live, then – instead of pleading, begging it to make room for us – we should be taking the space we need. Using our tools, using our resources, using our experiences, our knowledge(s), our senses.

In the summer of 2021, as part of my scholarship from the German cultural academy Tarabya in Istanbul, I visited anarchist collectives, anti-capitalist initiatives, interviewed oppositional thinkers, authors, politicians, artists and environmental organisations. For example, the artist Fatoş İrven (Kurdish spelling »İrwen«), who told me in an interview about creating as an act of emancipation. Especially in a society, an environment, a space where it has been annulled. As a Kurdish person. As a resistant, critical thinker. As an artist. As a woman. As a human.

In 2016, she was sentenced to three years in prison after being accused by a “secret witness” of carrying out terrorist propaganda. At this prison: Diyarbakır E Tipi Kapalı Cezaevi. She describes how the prison was designed to make her feel worthless. And how she – through the feeling of nothingness, not as a form of submission, but as emancipation from the circumstances – began to create art and imaginations. In prison of all places. In a place where the Turkish state wanted to forcibly deprive her of her autonomy, she started creating from scratch, reclaiming her autonomy. Meticulously gathering her long hair. And those of her fellow inmates, who gradually began to donate their hair, which she used to form balls. Patterns. Stories. The edges of cloths embroidered, decorated. Cloths she describes. Insects. Layers of paint on the prison walls. She collected what she found. And gave things meanings that reach far beyond the walls of the confined spaces in which the state tries to confine them. She experienced: the emergence from nothing. Being out of nothing.

The future is already happening. Everywhere. Our task is to enlarge these spaces, elevate these voices, connect these visions, create room for imagination. The very consciousness that things could be otherwise.

[8] James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (New York: Pantheon, 2011), p. 67.

art work by the Kurdish activist & artist Fatoş Irwen who I interviewed on her time in prision & creating art out of "nothingness"

Imagination is the central formative agency in human society.
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

photographic impressions of the imagination dinners
photographer: Swetlan Holz

IMAGINATION DINNERS

conducted by the travel agency THE IMAGINATION AGENCY founded in 2037. To learn more: theimaginationagency.org

One of the results of the backcasting workshops we ran in 2020 with various marginalised groups to identify desirable futures was: No matter how much we twisted these workshops styles, they were not made for marginalised groups whose visions of desirable futures have been humiliated into merely survival and the right to exist, but were, in fact, designed around those who were seeking to either sustain or enhance their current status of power in various future scenarios.

So I went into a multi-year long redesigning these workshops, explored alternatives and eventually created the "Imagination Dinners".

Together with my team and located at eeden – a feminist co-creation space I have co-founded in 2019 – we have experimented with and tested these dinners and are in the process of developing a prototype for embodied future design workshops. The "Imagination Dinners" are designed to train our muscle of imagination, shift our attention from what there is to what there could be, and reframe our power in the now.

The first experimental imagination dinners (see below) took place in June 2023 — themed “The Future of: The Culture of Conflict” and “The Future of: The Local”. Together with various experts involved in conflict (conflict negotiators, journalists, campaigners, international development activists, mediators on a community and national level etc.) we debated and imagined a world within which constructive conflict resolutions have become the norm. At the second dinner, together with experts on local engagement, homelessness, city data science, architecture & infrastructure, we explored the question: What if we lived in a world in which we humans, here in the West, were capable of truly living locally?

We have since explored and reimagined the roles of literature, theatre and music in a just world – together with experts in those respective fields (editors, agents, writers, musicians, producers, actors, directors etc.).

In 2024, together with my team, we not only intend to conduct several more Imagination Dinners around the world, document them, share insights into what works and what doesn't, how (re)imagination actually works, what they (re)imagined, but also explore the common patterns between each cohort by bringing them together: from how they interact, may be interdependent, interwoven, different or even contradictory.

THE IMAGINATION AGENCY

THE TEAM

KÜBRA GÜMÜSAY

founder & co-director
writer & researcher

SOPHIE SY

musician & activist

NÜRSEN KAYA

co-founder of eeden

PASCAL SCHMIDT

dancer & founder
of house of brownies

ALICE GEDAMU

co-director
systemic coach & consultant

TRANG SCHWENKE-LAM

scholar & therapist

JESSICA LOUIS

designer & co-founder of eeden

ROSA BRANDT

founding co-director
of future matters

photo credit: Swetlana Holz
credit for profile photos (left to right): private, Anja Weber, private, André Giesemann, private, private, Carolin Windel, Future Matters.

Animierter Hintergrund_Light Leaks.mp4

UTOPIA TALKS

What are imaginations of a future world that are beyond the destructive forces of neo-liberal capitalism, patriarchy, racism and climate injustice? Where and how have alternative, progressive, just futures – “real utopias” – already come into being? What can we learn from transition towns and eco-villages, from anarcho-eco-feminist collectives, intersectional feminist alliances to temporary protest camps? Are there any practises and insights that are worth to evaluate as possible practises that can be transferred to mainstream society? What has already been transferred? What works? What doesn't?

pictures of the Utopia Talks premiere with Maja Göpel in January 2024 photographer: Fabian Hammerl

In UTOPIA TALKS, a public talk series at Thalia Theater in Hamburg, in conversation with our thought-provoking, inspiring guests – scholars, thinkers, writers & practitioners in politics, art, media, social & community work with expertise in imagining or practising otherwise – we will

(1) investigate what there is by analysing the dominant norms and practises: the dystopian elements of the present;

(2) curate and highlight alternative practises in the present: knowledge from "real utopias" and

(3) explore "what if": How can this knowledge from the margins, "real utopias", alternative practises or imaginations be transferred to mainstream society?

Over the course of the series of talks, we will explore imaginations and real utopias beyond the destructive forces of neo-liberal capitalism, patriarchy, racism, climate injustice, and many other forms of injustice, destructiveness and alienation in today's world. Moving from the deconstruction of the present to the construction of alternative futures. From what else there could be to what else is emerging and already is. From analysis to imagination to practise.

The overarching goal of this series, is to sharpen our perception of dystopian elements as well as real utopias in our present, and finally, expand our imaginations of what is possible.

TEAM
Flow concept & Music by Rabih Lahoud
Research Assistance by Helena Sattler
Thalia Theater Dramaturge: Julia Lochte
Thalia Theater Dramaturgy Assistance: Natalja Starosta
Thalia Theater Scenography: Daniel Goergens

hosted at

funded by

TWO TALKS WITH SOME INSIGHTS INTO MY RESEARCH & THE UPCOMING BOOK

ABOUT

Kübra Gümüşay is a bestselling author, speaker and founder of award winning organisations and campaigns. She is currently a fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg, researching just futures, real utopias and politics of imagination.

She is the author of the bestselling book “Sprache § Sein” (“Speaking and Being”, Profile Books) and founder of several award winning campaigns and associations – most recently eeden, a feminist co-creation space in Hamburg (selected as „Kultur- und Kreativpiloten Deutschland“ in 2019), and future_s, a feminist research- and advocacy organisation for desirable futures. In 2018, Forbes Magazine selected her as one of “30 under 30” in Europe. In 2021 she was recipient of the Tarabya Artist in Residency Fellowship of the German Kulturakademie. And in 2022/3, a Senior Mercator Fellow at the Centre for Research in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and a Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. As of September 2023, she is a fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg, researching just futures, real utopias and politics of imagination.