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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\u201cFuturability,\u201d on the other hand, offers a possibility of forgetting<\/em> the future as it is understood in this dominant model of thinking about time under capitalism. If capitalist realism describes capital\u2019s ability to seize us from within and persuade us that it is the only viable economic system, futurability interrupts the faith in the infinite spiral of capital accumulation. When Berardi calls for the \u201cend of the future,\u201d when he echoes the screaming refrain of 1970s punk\u2014no future<\/em>\u2014 he is saying that we need to abandon capitalism\u2019s tenacious hold on what is to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The future, as its Latin root indicates \u2014 futurus<\/em> is the future participle of esse<\/em>(to be) \u2014 has something to do withthe being<\/em> of the future, but what this future might be is increasingly uncertain, to say the least, given the unfolding political, medical, and economic crises, which are symptomatic of a generalized planetary crisis. Will the viral saboteur inexorably spreading across the globe force us to abandon this identification of progressive growth and futurity? \u201cTo what degree,\u201d asks political economist David Harvey, \u201cis the virus an anti-capitalist agent?\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - David Harvey, \u201cAnti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19,\u201d Jacobin<\/em>, March 20, 2020.<\/span> It has become clear in recent weeks just how much of capitalist organization becomes inoperable under present conditions :<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe recent convulsions of the planetary body have provoked a collapse that obliges the organism to stop, slow down, desert the crowded places and the frantic daily negotiations.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Berardi, \u201cBifo \u2014 Diary of the Psycho-Deflation.\u201d<\/span> What can the future become<\/em>, after this collapse of the economic order, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic? What next?<\/em> Futurability asks us to imagine a plurality of conflicting possible futures inscribed in the present reality and, hence, the range of possible futures that may unfold. The critical question then becomes: how can other possible unfoldings inscribed in the present be actualized? This question is not new. It belongs also to discourses and practices of contemporary art; to an abundance of Afro-, queer, and Indigenous futurisms, posthumanisms, and speculative philosophies that aim to cultivate abilities<\/em> to envision and effect alternative futures.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - The \u201cprecarious futurity\u201d of our concept of the future is the subject of the anthology Futurity Report<\/em>(Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).<\/span> In their video works, the Karrabing Film Collective, composed of thirty intergenerational members of the Belyuen community of Australia\u2019s Northern Territories, use \u201ctranstemporal frameworks\u201d that incorporate layers of the past and the future into their everyday struggles negotiating settler-colonial power.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Tess Lea and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, \u201cKarrabing: An Essay in Keywords,\u201d Visual Anthropology Review<\/em> 34, no. 1 (2018): 36\u201346.<\/span> Combining traditional cosmology and storytelling with new video technologies, the films afford critical lessons for these viral times. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland<\/em> (2018) follows a young Indigenous man who was taken from his family by white settlers as a baby, as he is released into ancestral lands poisoned by extractive capitalism. A futuristic work shot on cell phone cameras using an unscripted,\u201cimprovisational\u201d method, Mermaids<\/em> opens in a hospital of a near future \u2014 amidst an outbreak of an epidemic that exclusively plagues white people, who can only venture outside dressed in hazmat suits. A toxic mud teems with angry Mermaids<\/em> enslaved by white settlers. Forming a pact with the dangerous Blow Flies<\/em>, the Mermaids demand the sacrifice of Indigenous children. In one of many uncanny correspondences between Karrabing depictions of the future and the present reality through which we are living in isolation, a woman\u2019s voice announces over a loudspeaker, \u201cThis area is under a level two biohazard quarantine.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n In one scene, a young boy and his grandmother track through smoldering bush. A carbon bomb explodes in the distance, sending a cacophony of birds into the red sky. \u201cLook how big this fire is. From that fracking, or what?\u201d he asks. \u201cWhat this world like before?\u201d Mermaids<\/em> presents the answer in a series of hallucinatory confrontations with possible pasts and futures. From the ancestral practice of Dreamtime<\/em> storytelling emerges a multilayered critique of the state-based violence of land divisions and environmental destruction. The film also offers a survival strategy for future generations. By preserving their stories, the Karrabing (which means \u201clow tide\u201d in the Emmiyengal language and refers to collectivity formed outside official government-imposed structures) actualize \u201cwhat is already potentially within the group.\u201d In turn, their films are leveraged to manifest new arrangements in reality.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Ibid, 42.<\/span> In order to actualize new visions of futurity, Berardi says, you need potency\u2014or power.<\/em> Power is a structure that makes possible an unfolding of certain possibilities. It also makes alternate possibilities invisible: it operates as a machine of invisibilization. The historically specific approach to governing risk known as biosecurity deploys digital technology as the main aesthetic agent of perceptual transformation. Part of the challenge the pandemic brings to biosecurity is to render perceptible the invisible enemy within, through an intensified, data-driven regime of biometric and surveillance technologies that track bodies and partition global space. Biosecurity aims to securitize the future with aesthetic technologies that require an ongoing staging of spectral absence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But the virus is also a strange kind of machine of invisibilization. Omnipresent, yet invisible. COVID-19 makes bodies disappear into body bags and makeshift morgues: refrigerated trucks, ice rinks, underground garages \u2014 mass graves. In just one hundred days, the economy, underpinned by a regime of linear time regulated by clocks, deadlines, work weeks\u2014calendar time and its interlocking infrastructure of global trade, airlines, data exchange, stock market rhythms and capital flows \u2014 has fallen into a black hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pandemic has laid bare disparities in wealth, labour, health care, and what Judith Butler calls \u201cgrievability.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?<\/em>(New York: Verso, 2016).<\/span> To the extent that it mandates that we hold still and stay home (a directive invariably stratified by race, class, and gender across geographies), the pandemic has made visible a fungible labour class disproportionately exposed to death. While the wealthy shelter in place, \u201cessential workers\u201d are asked to put their lives at risk in exchange for what, in many cases, is already less than a living wage. \u201cWe are not essential,\u201d they call out, \u201cwe are sacrificial.\u201d The pandemic has exposed the criminality of carceral economies that extract profit from the warehousing of human life, which we hide from view to protect our good conscience. This global \u201cnecronomy\u201d\u2014a portmanteau of the Latin term \u201cnecro\u201d (death) and \u201ceconomy\u201d \u2014 is the lethal underside of biopower that still proceeds by \u201cletting die\u201d large segments of the global population to safeguard the continuity of accumulation. The virus inaugurates a new \u201cdistribution\u201d or partitioning of the visible that puts into sharp focus the expansion of death under capitalist violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time as the virus makes visible how power operates to divide who lives and who dies, however, it calls this very division into question by complicating the split between life and nonlife. As epidemiologists have explained, the virus is neither living nor dead. Hijacking its host\u2019s replicative machinery, the virus copies itself before its signs and symptoms can be detected. It infects, replicates, spreads, mutates \u2014 it becomes impossible to trace. \u201cThe division of Life and Nonlife,\u201d explains Elizabeth A. Povinelli, a member of the Karrabing collective, \u201cdoes not confine or contain the Virus, it can use and ignore this division for the sole purpose of diverting the energies of arrangements of existence in order to extend itself.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Elizabeth A Povinelli. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 19.<\/span> The virus disrupts \u2014 even deconstructs \u2014 the difference between life and nonlife. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What visions of the future can be foretold in the face of the new reality that confronts us today? Two possible scenarios, very schematically: the first alternative, which gives a grim vision of the future, aligns with what Naomi Klein calls \u201ccoronavirus capitalism.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Naomi Klein, \u201cCoronavirus Capitalism \u2014 and How to Beat It,\u201d The Intercept<\/em>, March 16, 2020.<\/span> Klein describes capitalism\u2019s perverse ability to profit from catastrophe: unfolding declarations of emergency powers and imperial sovereignty are justified by the threat of viral contagion, allowing for the implementation of new, more ubiquitous forms of global surveillance. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n In the second scenario \u2014 and this coexists<\/em> with the first\u2014the current disruption is an opportunity not only<\/em> for the re-entrenchment of right-wing authoritarian policies, but also<\/em> for making visible a heterogeneity of divergent and conflicting possibilities inscribed in the present. Our task: to distinguish the layers of futurability inscribed in the texture of the present. \u201cOnly if we are able to disentangle the future (the perception of the future, the concept of the future, and the very production of the future) from the traps of growth and investment,\u201d writes Berardi, will we find a way out of the vicious subjugation of life to the corpse-like abstraction that is semio-capital. \u201cThe key to this disentanglement can be found in a new form of wisdom: harmonizing<\/em> with exhaustion<\/em>.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Franco \u201cBifo\u201d Berardi, \u201cThe Future After the End of the Economy,\u201d e-flux<\/em> 30 (December 2011), <www.e-flux.com\/ journal\/30\/68135\/the-future-after-the-end- of-the-economy\/>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The shared message of Berardi\u2019s oracular divinations and the angry rumbling of the Karrabing\u2019s creeping mud is this: we are approaching a new temporal horizon, conditioned by extinction. Drawn together by a shared chthonic knowledge, both prophetic iterations issue from the Earth made wretched<\/em> \u2014 from soil \u201ccontaminated, eroded, burnt, exploded, flooded and impoverished on a worldwide scale.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh, \u201cThe Wretched Earth,\u201d Third Text<\/em> 32, no. 2\u20133 (2018): 163.<\/span> Learning to live finally in relationship with extinction \u2014 with the recognition of our mortal finitude\u2014is a necessity that the virus has made more apparent, even as capitalism forbids us to imagine an end to expansion. Karrabing films offer a vision of a future from the perspective of our mortality and fragility\u2014a kind of being- toward-planetary-death<\/em> of the image. Whereas capitalist futurity involves a socio-technological organization of the perceptual field that aims to invisibilize other possibilities, Karrabing\u2019s multilayered films unfold heterochronies lingering in the present. Invoking an ancestral or \u201cspiritual\u201d power, the collective\u2019s Dreamtime stories destabilize the divide of the presently living and nonliving, from which capital draws its power. Mermaids<\/em> affords strategies and tactics of future-making by and through imaging; it offers another perceptual modality that resists capital\u2019s colonization of the future. By recovering the ancestral stories and ways of being from a past \u2014 a past that is never really past but continues to live through generational inheritance \u2014 they are \u201cseeking a now that can breed futures,\u201d as the poet Audre Lorde once wrote in her litany for survival.13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Audre Lorde, \u201cA Litany for Survival,\u201d The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde<\/em> (New York: Norton, 2000).<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn the beginning,\u201d says a young girl at the end of Mermaids<\/em>, \u201cthere was only Karrabing movies. And there was Mermaids\u2026 and mud. \u201d This voice from the future is among those that will have taught us to begin imagining what Berardi calls the starting point of the coming time \u2014 a time that is about to be: futurus esse.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO1-Img3-IM_Fulton_Shametaj_APOCALYPSE-WOW-00004_CMYK_resultat-e1629216370166.jpg\")
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Apocalypse Wow!<\/em>, video stills, 2018.
Photos : courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO1-Img4-IM_Fulton_Karrabing_MermaidsKieranWalkingStill_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
The Mermaids<\/em>, or Aiden in Wonderland, <\/em>video stills, 2018.
Photos : courtesy of Karrabing Film Collective<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO1-Img6-IM_Fulton_Karrabing_Mermaids-Pelicans_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
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