KODWO ESHUN – NARRATIVES OF A NEAR FUTURE c/o HEAD GENEVE

Key Takeaways

On the futures industry:

“What is critical is to situate this practice within the wider chronopolitical field which some people call the ‘speculative time complex’ in which Futures Trading, algorithmic trading, seven-year plans, development proposals, military simulations, securitized preemptions, economic forecasts all seek to extract, mine, and trade on the future. And what emerges from this is the understanding that the continent, by which I mean the 54 countries that assemble the continent of Africa, have never not been the object of what we could call the futures industry. An industry whose apparatuses, whose networks, and whose devices, aim to coerce consent for its preferred future. This is a laboratory for the production of preferred futures, hostile futurities, and complicit futurisms.”