“Abolishing the rational, embracing the strange can create portals to other worlds”. Future Natures wants your vision of a weird nature
From Future Natures site
An invitation to bring your stories, images and videos of “strange natures” to the Future Natures site, deadline 17th November 2023 (mail here). Here’s their excellent and fascinating rationale, studded with links to cutting-edge humanities research:
These are strange days. The air is made heavy by crises, and we can almost feel static from frictions as we rub against invisible thresholds.
For some, there is a sense of being stuck in a long present made weird, as near-futures interact with revenants from the past.
We walk landscapes that feel out of place, out of space, out of time, eerie, strewn with ruins, haunted by traumas. Life-worlds foreclosed; failed promises of progress. The spectres of imagined futures that never materialised.
For some, daily experience frustrates the ordinary, rational ways of perceiving time, space, ecology, causality, and agency. It can frustrate the sense of control, of mastery, of anthropocentrism - that which underlies the big stories we’re told about growth, development and nature.
Ruptures are ever more difficult to hide, and as the shadows get longer, uncertainties grow, and we hear the monsters’ claws scratching at the door… the strange can be terrifying.
But abolishing the rational, embracing the strange can create portals to other worlds.
These can open up new ways of seeing that can help us historicize, recast and subvert binary ways of thinking and dominant framings. How the anthropocene defines our politics of ecology, crisis and control.
They can help us to make sense of alienating and unsettling effects that globalisation has had on bodies and embodied experience.
They might provoke us to re-map geographies and re-formulate stories about relations between places and their ‘absent presences’. These are rendered through the historical and present-day enclosure and erasure of people’s struggles for life, against the expansion of colonialism and petro-racial capitalism.
How can a fascination with the strange that abolishes the rational, the search for control, help us face our fears of the dark places and cosmic horrors of extinction, ecocide and climate change?
How can it help us to move beyond apocalyptic grand narratives of the planetary, the spectacular, the abstract?
How can it help us to instead tell stories that ‘stay with the troubles’ of actual, ordinary, emplaced relations, struggles and happenings that come with living and dying in the ecologically troubled present?
Can noticing, seeing, listening and reading reality through strangeness lead us to radical re-enchantment? To giving-over and embracing the weirdness of the world as we know it? To acceptance of uncertainty as fundamental to experience?
Can we embrace the inevitability of transformation into a changing, vastly more-than-human universe of possibilities?
A Season of Strange Natures: call for entries & ideas
A fascination with the strange is a fascination for that which lies beneath the surface, beyond ordinary ways of seeing, sensing and perceiving.
In the past decade and more, artists, novelists, filmmakers, journalists, scientists and critical theorists have engaged the aesthetics, affect and atmospherics of the strange, the supernatural, the haunted, the weird, the monstrous and the horrific.
They have used them as critical tools and allegorical devices for seeing, exploring and storying history, politics and natures at the current juncture.
We invite contributions of creative works and reflections that unsettle our expectations and engage with the strange through a variety of genres.
Contributions might explore, for example, spectral geographies, haunted places and landscapes, eerie atmospheres, weird spaces and bodies, ecologies, monstrous creations, uncanny encounters and entanglements, contemporary folk- or fairy tales and (other)worldly enchantments.
We’re looking for contributions in diverse forms and media, not limited to art, short fiction and non-fiction, visual ‘memes’, text and photo-essays, film/book reviews or responses, short videos/films, photography, audio, and multimedia pieces.
Share a contribution: Share a piece by email attachment or dropbox link to hello@futurenatures.org by 17 November.
Share something else: share an article, a book, a piece of art, a place that excites your fascination with the strange using the hashtag #StrangeNatures on Twitter
Resources
Explore some related materials from Future Natures and other sources.
A Journey through the ancient commons of the Bristol Ring Road by Andy Thatcher
Ogres of East Africa by Sofia Samatar
The world has become weird: crisis, natures and radical re-enchantment – Blog by Amber Huff and Nathan Oxley, January 2021
Escape from Incel Island – book by Margaret Killjoy
Weird Ecologies (comic)
Weird Ecologies – talk by Amber Huff and Adrian Nel, 2022
The Weird and the Eerie – Roger Luckhurst’s review of the book by Mark Fisher
Hauntings in the Anthropocene – essay by Jeff VanderMeer