Culture as Cult
Notes from the Future Fabulators Kick-off Scenario in October 2013, based on the question: “What will be the legacy of Future Fabulators?”
In a world ravaged by climate chaos and perpetual economic, social and cultural upheaval fuelled by blinded (and blinding) neoliberal dogmatism, Future Fabulators emerge as a troupe of travelling storytellers, ushering in alternatives to a dire status quo. Their lives are experiments in tactical living – peripheral and nearly invisible, they incite fleeting moments of jouissance before vanishing back underground. Renowned as an antagonistic cult of a new sociality, they respond to a post-collapse reality by conducting short-lived, ad hoc experiments in (what used to be known as) public spaces.
Their experiments fall on fertile ground. Fragmented, frustrated communities unable to see themselves in the optimistic rhetoric of the powers that be rise up and turn the stories into reality, the future forecasts into immediate action. Future Fabulators adopt the mantle of the oral storytellers of old – sharing tidings, skills and narratives about survival and survivalism; spreading rumours and destabilising slogans. Their legendary cult status grows as they transform stories into action time and again. They promulgate a new weather lore – the proverbs and aphorisms of climate chaos, which gradually come to be regarded as post-collapse prophecies.
They travel slowly, using arcane means of transport, vehicles that are a bricolage of archaic and future technologies. Their troupe is distributed widely across Europe, and while they might meet only once every few years, most of the time they work remotely, connected through online storytelling systems and dust-swept archives. Along the way they participate in non-market-based sharing economies, local pockets of hope amidst much fatigue, disease and death. They help instigate and maintain new social and political movements, some of which originated in their own previous experiments. A sparkle of hope – but one you never know when or where might appear, before dissolving into darkness again…
This scenario is one of four Future Fabulators Legacy scenarios:
This scenario was further developed as an experience prototype during the residency of Sarah Neville and family at Vitalstatistix in Adelaide, Australia. See more information about the residency at Sarah's journal page.