Nathalie Desmet :<\/strong> In Les potentiels du temps : Art et politique<\/em> (Time\u2019s Potential: Art and Politics), written with Camille de Toledo (2016), you advocate shifting away from apocalyptic discourse and the philosophy of finitude in order to focus on principles of potentiality that would allow a future reality to be written. What steps do you recommend so that the present isn\u2019t reproduced in the future? As 1:1 scale practices, speculative fiction, and forms of simulation or potential justice are your preferred tools, what seems relevant to you about these forms? In what ways are they likely to open onto more \u201coblique\u201d times?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quir\u00f3s : <\/strong>If we are to dive right into the heart of this book and its thesis, perhaps we should begin by saying that we envisioned it as an art theory essay and that for us, it was an attempt to reconsider the relationship between what art can do, as a particular space of production and dissemination of knowledge and practices, and what prevents us politically in our current times \u2014 the feeling of overwhelming powerlessness. This feeling is produced by an ever-widening gap between what we imagine for the future world, through art and theory, and the impossibility of politically putting into action that which can actually change a particular state of the present. What we call a \u201cpotential regime\u201d consists of three main operations. The first one, rather theoretical, involves taking what we consider to be fiction not as a \u201cpossible world\u201d\u2014that is, in contrast to the actual, to what is there, or as a \u201cprogram\u201d to be applied and a potential to be realized\u2014but as an operator<\/em> able to carry the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second operation, which is focused more on art practices, involves examining certain apparatuses working at the 1:1 scale and trying to connect them \u2014 artworks and curatorial projects that try not to blur<\/em> the division between fact and fiction but to play with the degree of fictionality in what gets produced there, in what could henceforth become an event as well as remain a scene, a fiction2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - For example, in the case of The Battle of Orgreave<\/em>by Jeremy Deller and JRMiP Congress<\/em> by Yael Bartana, speculative forms of justice or, more broadly, all practices that Jonas Staal qualifies as assemblism, do not fall solely under the auspices of art but are also historical events, part of the course of political history.<\/span>It What is particularly interesting in the examples we discuss \u2014 the art practices of Yael Bartana and Jeremy Deller, and that of Bruno Latour and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9rique A\u00eft- Touati and their pre-enactment<\/em>of COP21 \u2014 is that they oscillate, crossing and re-crossing the border between what happened<\/em> and what could have happened<\/em>; they exploit a dual status, both potential and actual. This instability allows them to compose, correct, diverge, backtrack, and test hypotheses counter to twentieth-century political utopias, which were conceived with a programmatic aim. They can make, unmake, remake. In fact, we know that fear of disaster is everywhere: fear of past disasters (the authoritarianism resulting from revolutionary processes \u2014 that is, fear of the enfant terrible that our political utopias might bring forth) and future ones (given climate change and, now, the recession due to the pandemic, there is no second chance or Planet B \u2014 which is also what paralyzes us in our attempts to take action). Given these imaginaries of past and future disasters, we need spaces where it is possible, at any time, to pull down the curtain of fiction, stop the collective process, and say, \u201cLet\u2019s back up a bit and turn down a different road.\u201d Fiction gives us permission. We need to increase the number of political spaces in which it will be possible to use the \u201cfiction coefficient\u201d strategically to compose worlds that we would like to see realized \u2014 in other words, to politicize that which frames something as fiction. The third operation involves seeking that which can extend these ephemeral experiments beyond their limits and move toward what we call a \u201cpotential regime,\u201d a regime of historicity (a notion that we borrow from Fran\u00e7ois Hartog3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Fran\u00e7ois Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time<\/em>, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).<\/span>), which is neither actual nor fictional, but always on the threshold of becoming one or the other. Although none of the art practices discussed, despite the highest degree of interest we brought to bear upon them, entirely meet all the conditions of what we would have them say, in assembling them we nevertheless see indications of the time we are experiencing already, this potential regime, and the powerful chronopolitics4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Taking up Paul Virilio\u2019s concept, Hartmut Rosa defines chronopolitics as an organization of the rhythm, duration, speed, sequencing, and synchronization of events and activities and the arena for power struggles. As such, chronopolitics is a central component of any form of domination. See Hartmut Rosa, SocialAcceleration:<\/em>A New Theory of Modernity<\/em>, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 12. 26<\/span> that they represent. We see the possible horizon of a potential regime as both a double of the world and a deviation from it that can circum vent the philosophy of finitude, which never finishes off finishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/meta>ND : <\/strong>You have categorized the actualization of this thinking into three actions: express, map, transmit. In the current context, which of these seems most urgent to carry out? Is it in fact a philosophy of urgency? Est-ce d\u2019ailleurs une pens\u00e9e de l\u2019urgence ? We are living in a particular moment in which a great number of theoretical and formal propositions proliferate, yet ultimately none of them, whether they come from politics, science, or art, proves to be sufficiently robust on its own to spur people into action collectively. We therefore need to keep searching and multiplying them constantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/meta>ND : <\/strong>With your current project, Les impatients<\/em>(The Impatient Ones), which you describe as a chronopolitical series, you go in search of people and signs of the future. Have you managed to find some of these signs? Later, when we returned to Paris, Nuit Debout (Rise Up at Night) began, and we were struck by the way in which this movement occupied the public square to better unoccupy the present. The movement\u2019s inaugural action started on March 31, 2016, and then extended March (March 32, March 33, and so on) \u2014 in other words, it was an action on time. In the film, Maurizio Lazzarato aptly describes Nuit Debout as a great breakaway movement from the \u201cconfinement of time.\u201d We tried to capture the joy of \u201cdismantling time\u201d and the jubilation of rediscovering possibility in politics that were palpable on the faces and bodies. The film then continued as an investigation into non-linear time in Leipzig, Dakar, and other places that we see as chronotopes<\/em>\u2014 specific space-times that give rise to an atypical consideration of time, knots of time, chronopolitical strategies and tactics\u2014far from the cold and homogeneous time of global simultaneity. . For example, \u201c#Accelerate<\/em>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Manifesto<\/em>for an Accelerationist Politics,\u201d 8 <\/a> - Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, \u201c#Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics<\/em>,\u201d Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2014, <www.multitudes.net\/ manifeste-accelerationniste\/><\/span>For example, \u201c#Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,\u201d which is one of the most stimulating essays written in recent years on the subject of future chronopolitics (and around which we organized a mini-trial at the Centre Pompidou in 2014), nevertheless proceeds, as a proposition, from an inattention to what is already at play here and there. It was necessary, therefore, for the filmLes impatients<\/em> to go back through the singularity of the bodies that pass through spaces and the actions that take place there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n ND : <\/strong>What art or curatorial practices currently seem most promising to you for transforming the state of the real and considering the future? ND : <\/strong>Do you think that queer theory can be applied or used as a lever to build new temporalities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n AI & KQ :<\/strong> Yes, we would need to apply a certain number of contemporary currents of thought and the power that they\u2019ve always had in them. Queer theory, which developed in the 1990s as an extension of the philosophy of Wittig (who saw heterosexuality as a political regime), among others, was already calling for a complete and global subversion of the political and symbolic order. If one refers to the idea not only of chronopolitics but also of \u201cchronobiopolitics\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - According to Elizabeth Freeman, chro- nobiopolitics is a temporal order that doesn\u2019t only regulate individual lives, but also takes measures to control the asymmetrical rhythms of the entire population and thereby organize the seemingly \u201ctimeless\u201d value and meaning of time. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories<\/em> (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010).<\/span> and the concept of \u201ctoward the future\u201d\u2014developed by Cuban thinker Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz in his book Cruising <\/em>Utopia<\/em>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - See Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics<\/em>(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity<\/em> (New York: New York University Press, 2009).<\/span>in which he describes queerness as something \u201cnot yet here,\u201d not yet attained\u2014in this sense, the operation of \u201cqueering\u201d the museum, for example, would involve the inclusion of minority narratives not just to decanonize its history but also to escape from the prison of present time that holds our imagination captive. Queering the museum<\/em> would mean disrupting its function, producing difference<\/em> in time, and dismantling the Western modernist construction of time and its relationship with historical narratives. However, what we have witnessed in recent decades is that the adoption of these concepts by art and research, concepts that initially arose as much from activism and collective and bodily experiences as from theory, sometimes runs the risk of turning them into simple methodological tools that can be applied to any place or space. Their generalized application thus becomes a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it indicates the initial power of these movements; on the other hand, it most often participates in transforming historical movements rooted in bodies and struggle into mere research methodologies, sometimes resulting, by extension, in a \u201cdisembodiment\u201d of these tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO3-Img3-IM_Desmet_LesImpatients_Episode2_Leipzig-AliochaImhoff_KantutaQuiros_still_2019_CMYK-C2_resultat-e1626363026600.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO3-Img4-IM_Desmet_LesImpatients_Episode3_Paris-AliochaImhoff-KantutaQuiros_still_2019-2_CMYK_resultat-e1626363070591.jpg\")
(top) Les impatients, \u00c9pisode 2, Leipzig <\/em>;
(bottom) Les impatients, \u00c9pisode 3, Paris<\/em>, video stills, 2019.
Photos : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Could the futurism of Afrofuturism enable us to deal with future closures on both sides of the Atlantic?<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
AI & KQ :<\/strong>The aspect that most concerns us in Les potentiels du temps<\/em> is the act of mapping. We understand this act not as a closure or a description that could be completed, but as a kind of multiplication. As Deleuze said, \u201cA theory does not totalize; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Gilles Deleuze, \u201cIntellectuals and Power \u2014 A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,\u201d in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 208.<\/span>. \u201d We often consider research not as a way of producing new theories for the world, but as being based on a curatorial methodology,6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quir\u00f3s, \u201cCurating Research : Pour une diplomatie entre les savoirs,\u201dL\u2019art m\u00eame<\/em>no. 64 (Spring 2015), <www.lartmeme.cfwb.be\/no064\/documents\/AM64.pdf>.<\/span>a way of mapping contemporary practices and theories, then pitting them against each other and putting them on trial. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO3-Img1-IM_Desmet_LesImpatients_Episode1_Chicago-AliochaImhoff-KantutaQuiros_still_2019-2_CMYK_resultat-e1626367008440.jpg\")
Les impatients, Episode 1, Chicago<\/em>, video still, 2019.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO3-Img5-IM_Desmet_LesImpatients_Episode1_Chicago-AliochaImhoff_KantutaQuiros_still_2019-4_CMYK_resultat-e1626363208299.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO3-Img6-IM_Desmet_LesImpatients_Episode1_Chicago-AliochaImhoff-KantutaQuiros_still_2019-3_CMYK_resultat-e1626364988219.jpg\")
Les impatients, Episode 1, Chicago,<\/em> video stills, 2019.
Photos : courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO3-Img2-IM_Desmet_LesImpatients_Episode1_Chicago-AliochaImhoff-KantutaQuiros_still_2019-1_CMYK_resultat-e1626366309961.jpg\")
Les impatients, Episode 1, Chicago<\/em>, video still, 2019.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
AI & KQ :<\/strong> We began this film \u2014 or, rather, this series \u2014 after we had finished writing the book while in residence at the Rebuild Foundation (established by Theaster Gates), in Chicago\u2019s South Side. At the time, we were revisiting the writing of Bloch and Benjamin on left-wing melancholy and some contemporary texts on ways of rethinking dynamics for today. We were also especially interested in Afrofuturism and its way of considering the future as a site for historical action, particularly given the negative effect and context of the 2007 subprime<\/em> crisis\u2014which had a long-term impact on Chicago\u2019s South Side \u2014 and the Black Lives Matter movement. Even before we left Chicago, we had this question in mind: Could the futurism of Afrofuturism enable us to deal with future closures on both sides of the Atlantic? It seemed to us that through its historical appropriation of messianism, in terms of which European emancipatory utopias had long been formulated, Afrofuturism could imagine a future for a Europe stunned by foreshadowed defeat .7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Political thinking in Europe bears the mark of melancholy, relinquishment, and powerlessness, proliferating apocalyptic obsession and ideas of the promise of collapse, the future as threat, and the systematic disqualification of the possible.<\/span>It This is how the film began. Stony Island Arts Bank (the ruins of a former bank redeveloped by Theaster Gates, who transformed the capitalist temple into an art centre and library dedicated to Black culture), a place that we imagined as a museum of time in which each space unfolds periods of time stacked like nesting dolls between memory and futurity, a palimpsest of Chicago\u2019s history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AI & KQ :<\/strong> We are in the process of completing a book on the questions expressed in the Anthropocene era, mainly within the art world. We wanted to return to the famous question inherited from 1968 of \u201cwho speaks? \u201d but to consider it in terms of what various thinkers have formulated as the recognition of many new agents as political subjects<\/em>: animate beings, animals, plants, and even minerals, soils, objects, and others. This seems to be a widely contested locus of many formal propositions that have the potential to compose a future world, formulating what we call a more-than-human<\/em>democracy, even a gaiacracy.<\/em>.At the same time, while not cancelling it out, the future that we are living through is also more immediate, more urgent. Our experience of the ongoing pandemic and time spent in lockdown differed vastly depending on whether we had work or not, were alone, were susceptible to the illness, or had to look after children, depending on our social or housing conditions, our status, and other factors. And what has become even more evident, since this \u201csuspension of art\u201d and its production, is the profound need for a paradigm shift regarding the remuneration and means of support in art and literature for those who try to invent worlds that can exist between different media, disciplines, and levels of social status. In addition, what seems most interesting to us in our current moment are the forces that try to change the direction of museums, institutions, biennials in order to reconsider vanishing points. Now more than ever, we should be reconsidering projects such as the Mus\u00e9e de la danse <\/em>(The Dancing Museum) by Boris Charmatz, who proposed an integrated museum that would exist only on the condition that it was built by all the bodies that pass through it \u2014 those of the public and the artists, but also the museum staff (security guards, technicians, administrators, and others)\u2014who activate the works, and even become their interpreters; a museum woven together by all those who look after it \u2014 curators, maintenance staff, guides, security guards, artists. African American artist Fred Wilson has wonderfully and brilliantly already taught us this by making visible the bodies that we never see, but that take care of the museum, through his articulation of the museum framework.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO3-Img8-IM_Desmet_LesImpatients_Episode4_Dakar-AliochaImhoff_KantutaQuiros-still_2019-2_CMYK_resultat-e1626364765948.jpg\")
Les impatients<\/em>, Episode 4, Dakar, video still, 2019.
Photo : courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n