"A Look in the Rearview Mirror (While Still Moving Forward)" by Solvita Krese
It may have been August, because evenings were still balmy and you could sit in the garden till late. It may have been three years ago, when the economic crisis that shook up the order of things in the world was still just looming on the horizon and was not yet much spoken of in Latvia. It was then that a conversation one evening led to the idea of SURVIVAL KIT – an art project that would attempt to identify things that could prove vitally important to human existence, both in a material and, perhaps even more significantly, some metaphysical sense.
The first SURVIVAL KIT turned out to be almost prophetic, a response to the crisis that was already wreaking havoc on the Latvian economy in 2009, leaving scores of empty, bankruptcy ridden shops in its wake on the streets of Riga. Artists were invited to react to this situation and fill the empty spaces with a creative energy, offering various survival strategies rooted in DIY practices and innovative and witty solutions. By last year the map of the city had already changed, and SURVIVAL KIT-2 served to outline an archipelago of new creative initiatives, which had spread across the central quarters of Riga like self-organized mycelium.
So what has changed within the space of a year? To what extent can the seismography of change be foreseen or calculated? How much depends on global economic fluctuations, ecological processes or changes to the political map of the world? What can we influence ourselves – by examining past mistakes, making responsible choices or gaining new experiences?
Can it be asserted that we are now at a turning point, that we have stopped the downward spiral and are climbing slowly? Undeniably, we have mastered new survival skills, learnt to view events from a different angle, changed our customary hierarchy of values. We may move on. All that is now left is to imagine what it will look like. What is the future that awaits us.
What will the language of the future be? Will the majority of the world population be senior citizens? Will the climate change significantly? Will new sources of energy be found? What algorithms will be outlined by the development of the economy? What will happen to cities, will they shrink, or, to the contrary – take over most of the area of the continents? Perhaps it will become too expensive to fly, and the nomadic format of life will have to be changed? Will we return to localized economy, where every city dweller will have their own tiny garden allotment outside their window? Will the balance of power be redistributed on the political map of the world?
These and similar questions come to mind as we ponder our future. Certainly, futurology is no longer solely the competence of stargazers and prophets; it now commands the attention of economists, financiers and representatives of other exact sciences. Politicians and public opinion makers increasingly employ rhetoric that is tied up in promises, hopes or expectations, and based on future scenarios, imagined visions, attempts to conquer or tame the future.
Likewise, in conversations with artists the search for future has been revealed as a theme that rouses ideas and seems worthy of study/examination. This spring we also offered the Nākotnēšana/Foresight lecture marathon, in which representatives from various fields addressed the issues of the most basic human survival needs – food, health, economy and tried to assess how the economic crisis has changed our values and, accordingly, our possible future.
As the conceptual frame took on layers of more solid matter in the process of putting together the festival, we quite surprisingly found ourselves confronting the past – the rewriting and preservation of history, the analysis of interconnection and coincidence, hypotheses and doubts. It turned out that, in order to move forward or make a turn, from time to time your gaze has to travel to the rear-view mirror – just as if driving a car.
This development brought to my mind a text I had recently read, about 16th-Century missionaries who encountered a strange phenomenon in the Andean highlands: people whose future was behind them. The Aymara natives held to an inverted concept of time which featured metaphorized chronology, a total opposite of the Indo-European understanding of time. To the Aymara, tomorrow was a day that had passed. While the known past stretched out in front of them, the unknown future lurked waiting for them somewhere it could not be seen. The present became the past fading into the unknownness of the future, and the future served as a prerequisite of the present.
Perhaps a similar experience awaits the modern human? Insecurity, instability, precariousness make up one of the most relevant leitmotifs of our daily life. The life model of the contemporary man has changed quite sharply. The customary strict separation of work space and private space has faded. Your workplace can now be anywhere – at a café table, in a park, at the beach or in your bedroom. There are no longer any strict working hours. People work at night and on holidays. Part time employees, freelancers, the self-employed become a common format in the nomadic society. There is no real trust in any social guarantees any more, either, even if you’ve spent your working life diligently adding to your pension funds. The financial crisis is still roaming the globe like a storm cloud, triggering unexpected detonations in various spots of the world, undermining long-term plans and visions. Sustained temporariness, an orientation toward quick and flexible solutions is now the norm – one that does not produce any more or less clear vision of the future.
The past is the only time dimension that can still be influenced by a traditional political subject like a nation, asserts Boris Buden in one of his interviews, and quotes a joke heard in Russia – “our future is clear, but the past changes every day” – as confirmation that we can’t really do much about our future at all. We can only change our past in some way. Perhaps this joke is a nod in acknowledgement of new rules of history.
Maybe it is the sense that we can only reflect on these new history rules, but can do little to influence, intervene or change them, that encourages us to seek refuge in the past, or turn to the study of present regularities and focused comprehension of existence.
As we try to feel out the turning point that could mark a new trajectory in the development of the situation both globally and locally, I am reminded of Brian Holmes’ comparison of the “movement” of the world (comprising both the analytical and the metaphorically poetic aspect) to continental drift. This term, borrowed from geology and scientific theories, describes plate tectonics, the breaking apart of landmass, an indescribably powerful and brutal energy that moves and pools in various places of the globe. Paradoxically, this term also brings to mind some very personal things, like, for example, the Situationist practice of drifting or dérive, based in seemingly aimless roaming that allows the individual to become lost and discard purposeful intentions and rational coordinates. It seems the effect of continental drift is felt not only in ecology, but also throughout the realms of neoliberal economics, geopolitics and ideology, and the global collisions, splits, shifts and movements it provokes reach our private space in waves of vibration that affect our daily life.
This year the SURVIVAL KIT-3 festival is taking place in a former school building, to remind us of the new experiences we have gained and to encourage us to continue learning. Lessons are interspersed with recess breaks, just like texts are supplemented with footnotes which can sometimes exceed the main narrative in their importance – because often it is there that we may find clues to the puzzle set to us by a future built of countless individual experiences and prognoses yet unavoidably subject to the greater fluctuations and shocks of the world.