Abstract

In his talk, T. J. Demos looks at documentary figures as the creative practice of chronopolitics, designating the politics of time as much as the time of politics, both implying there’s nothing natural or inevitable about how we organize temporality. As such, documentary provides a technology for revealing portals into futures alternative to the now. In these practices, we encounter the unlikely experience of a future archive, an archive of what’s to come, afforded by a radical sci-fi, premised on the encounter of radical finitude and the fact that any and all archives are contradictory, constituted by the very inevitability of forgetting, according to Derrida’s poststructuralist analysis in Archive Fever. But what about an archive of what has yet to be remembered, even experienced altogether, an archive of realities that had yet to be documented? Building on the precedents of Afrofuturisms of decades past these practices now generate new configurations of documentary in multiple sectors, including those of Indigenous futurisms, trans and queer futurisms and multispecies and socialist futurisms, and more.

Bio

T. J. Demos  is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics, and ecology. He is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He researches the intersection of visual culture, radical politics, and political ecology—particularly where they oppose racial and colonial capitalism—and is the author of several books, including Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke, 2020); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg, 2016); and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, (Sternberg, 2017). He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). He is presently working on a new book on radical futurisms, to be published with Sternberg Press in 2022.