Keywords: Science fiction, cinema, literature, critical pedagogy, social- and environmental resistance.
In my artistic research project, ‘Other Worlds from Here’, I explore ways of writing, thinking and imagining science fiction in close relation to places. Here I am trying to locate the critical potential in writing and thinking science fiction (especially in literature) and then bringing it into specific contexts. This might entail collective writing of texts, ways of staging narratives (theatrically, with a camera, through sound and music etc.) as well as leading/participating in meetings, workshops and actions. A focus is especially on situations of conflict around extraction and rights to land. Here, I will try to work from a collective, artistic and critical pedagogical perspective. This is to see if the imaginary processes of especially eco-science fiction can bring new inputs to modes of resistance - and vice versa if a focus on struggles in contexts can bring something to the genre of science fiction.
My approach is to conduct research through different collaborations in cases. The first case is looking into environmental and social implications of the salmon farming industry’s introduction into areas in southern Chile (where Norwegian companies are among the most present).
I intend to produce various texts (both fiction and non-fiction) as well as film both as my own work and in collaborations. Further, I will document the activities conducted during the process to see if a methodology can emerge.
Kristian Byskov is a visual artist and writer also working within stage arts as well as critical pedagogy. My practice is dominated by collaboration and experimentation. In my work, the meetings between landscapes and narration seek to touch the audience in engaging ways while unfolding new meanings and possibilities. We are ever more connected to our surrounding ecological systems. This evolves within our daily lives and into our future world, formed by catastrophes and new becomings.
Since finishing my MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2013, I have exhibited, worked in engaged processes, staged performances and written novels and critical essays.
The potential of science fiction imagination should by now be clear to all of us when looking at how technologies and systems are developed to look and act more like the worst dystopian scenarios imaginable. But what if this potential was to be taken from a radical perspective and used as a tool for political counteraction?
Between our crisis of imagination in late capitalism (as mentioned by Frederic Jameson in Seeds of Time, Columbia University Press, 1994, p. xii) to the inherent potentials in all humans to be future-makers (Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact, Verso, 2013, p. 285), the challenges, risks and possibilities are laid out.
In this talk, I will seek to map out the critical potential of science fiction, drawing examples from my own work and the work of others. Then, beginning with an argument for the usefulness of speculative thinking, I will then share different contexts I have employed these tools and where it could go. Here, I will also reflect on the possible risks within the methodology taking shape.
Our most intense battlegrounds are not in a time nor space far from here, it is the water we drink, the heat that bakes us from above and deep down in our contaminated soils. The world tomorrow will be increasingly different from that of today. But that difference can be differently made.