FUTURE FRIEND/SHIPS: Keith Hennessy + Jassem Hindi
Counterpulse, 80 Turk Street, San Francisco, CA
December 15-17, 2016
future friend/ships is made from oracles and drones and childish dances.
Projecting oneself into the future is more often than not a privilege reserved to a happy few, and a way to reproduce sameness. future friend/ships casts a different kind of physical future fiction: we host the uninvited to conjure the curse.
We are amateur oracles and oracle-making machines. We call upon fragments of raging poetry, broken machines, dying animals, and plastic flowers. We use arab future fiction and punk anxiety as excuses and models. We celebrate, among others, the poetry of Etel Adnan, Nazik al Malaika and Donna Haraway. The more we generate potential for transformation, the more we will be surprised by the future. Otherness hosts otherness.
Utopian science-fiction texts, drone wars, rare documents from Middle Eastern artists, and ambivalent outcomes of the Arab Spring activate this work.future friend/ships is poetry as political practice.
Despite feeling powerless to save what is already lost, we consider it our role to imagine an impossible future, and to embody this (post) utopian place, in fragments, on stage, with rich visual components and a desire to share this experience with others. Our approach to Arab Futurism is to defend one simple idea: if it is impossible to project ourselves in a near immediate future because of war and misery, we can always imagine a fictional future.
