Futurity Island

Inspired by discussions on radical imagination, Indigenous thought, collective intelligence, and plural ecology, Futurity Island invites participants to develop new habits of thought in this era of environmental crisis. It is a space to speculate on the usefulness of the concept of “sympoiesis” for imaging and working together in radical interdisciplinarity toward desirable futures. In the utopian regime, the moment of future is transformed into a representable topography of space. Future is a place—an island—a defined location that is better than ours. It is characterized both by separation and distanciation. The geography of a utopian island is manipulatable, as well as conceivable at a glance; it is contained within its limits and is almost transportable as an architectural model or pavilion. The whole systematicity of the swamp rejects utopian logic, as it cannot be modelled properly within the complexity of symbiotic relationships. Tracing back the dialectics of island and swamp reveals the genesis of radical creativity, creatio ex nihilio, which was described by Cornelius Castoriadis. He conceptualized this process by offering the idea of radical imagination and conceiving it as a generative power, which, preceding every reality, grants a primordial access to materiality…