arebyte x A Sci Fi Curriculum

Sat 7th Jan, 4pm - 6pm

event part of FUTURES PAST exhibition

arebyte and A Sci-Fi Curriculum are thrilled to invite you to eROTic Potential, an active and participatory discussion between arebyte curator Rebecca Edwards and artist Yuli Serfaty, centred around the themes within the exhibition FUTURES PAST. Discussing extracts from Elvia Wilk, Karan Barad, Lola Olufemi and Bahar Noorizdaeh, we will explore how these texts contextualise some of the works in the exhibition through Climate-Fiction, non-linear, and erotic lenses. See texts below

The event will be photographed but not recorded. You are welcome to attend without having read the texts noted above. We welcome active discussion and passive engagement.
The event will take place during gallery opening hours. Attendees are to be aware that there will be noise in the gallery from the exhibition during the event.

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Thinking through decay and inherent emergent potential, the group will read Elvia Wilk’s 2020 essay This Rot; Erotics of Compost. The essay questions queerness as an opposition to a supposed ‘natural’ state, and challenges whether environments can be completely free of pollutants; and whether they should be. Through thinking with rot, Wilk suggests an earthly approach to gestation, care and reproduction in a time of overwhelming catastrophe.

Karan Barad’s 2016 essay, Troubling Time/s, Undoing the Future, dissimilates a sense of uniform time and describes multiple ways of remembering pasts and futures, inspired by both quantum theory and societal collapse. This sift through time/s becomes a useful tool for discussion, one we will use to venture through the ideas presented in the show.

Working with Barad’s multiplicity and Wilk’s rotting care, we will look at a chapter out of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, a 2021 book by Lola Olufemi. The book imagines a radical, blood-sweat-and-tears type of hope—one that persists against all odds, that finds a way even when it seems like there is no point in trying. In a half-fiction half instructional manifesto, Olufemi calls for a future that is there to be invented and critiqued.

Finally, addressing the idea of “unproductive time” in the face of the capitalist acceleration of the future, we will discuss Bahar Noorizadeh’s essay Slow Cancellation of the Past. Written in 2020, the text looks at research, education and knowledge production within the realm of the institution.

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A Sci-Fi Curriculum is a multimedia reading group discussing womxn- and BIPOC-centred Speculative Fiction stories with a queer lens.

Yuli Serfaty is a multimedia artist working in sound, moving image, sculpture and new media.