Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney [FoAM] [BE]

Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney are co-founders of FoAM, a distributed laboratory for speculative cultures. They recently established FoAM Earth as a nomadic cell of the network, where they explore futurecrafting as a way of re-enchanting the present. True to FoAM’s motto “grow your own worlds”, they create propositions, immersive situations and (peak) experiences. As an act of resistance against dystopian fears of uncertainty, they cultivate kinship networks and circumstances for conviviality and collaboration, while exploring animist approaches to time, attunement and interconnectedness as transformative practices for contemporary techno-materialist culture. FoAM’s works and ways of working invoke new worlds, summon echoes of voices otherwise unheard and entice collective imagination and solidarity.

For Terra Fiction, FoAM presents a lecture/performance where geological time, microbial contamination, non-corvid interaction, death and dying co-exist alongside audiovisual atmospheres from the Sonoran desert, Balkan forests and urban jungles. We’ll delve into the mythic and sensual dimensions of panpsychism, where everything shares an elemental consciousness. What would be the implications of such a worldview for our lives on Earth and beyond? How do we respond to climate change, mass extinction/speciation or migration when we assume that the entire material bestiary has some form of sentience? What parallel arts, sciences and technologies become possible? How do we engage with a world in which all is animate?