Early one morning, I woke up from a dream in which I had been telling two women about a future past present in which artistic practice had become the common way of living and relating. I don’t remember having a name for it in the dream, but given the strong influence Donna Haraway’s Chtulucene must have played and my immersion in developing Alterotopia, let’s call it the Alteroscene. As I explained to the women, in the Alteroscene earthlings had become accustomed to nurturing generative relations to time and place through symbiotic artistic practices. These practices had nothing to do with exploitative and extractive ways of relating. Long gone too was any thinking and doing in terms of human exceptionalism and, by extension, the admiration of exceptional individuals. The artist as genius was an irrelevant mode of appreciation.

The Alteroscene had come into being when the systemic oppression of creative becoming, so characteristic of the Othering times that came before, had lost its grip. As its stronghold crumbled, the many alterotopian artistic practices that had been gaining strength, together with countless other indigenous, earthly, more-than-human, muddy, material entanglements, upheaved and composted into a different future now.

From the perspective of the beings living in the Alteroscene, it was no surprise that during the peaks of what they called the Othering times many humans had been stuck in linear and instrumental relations to time and place, narrowly directing their longing to belong towards more of the same: identity, nationality and property. This sorry state of affairs was viciously sustained by the dominance of systems of extraction and exploitation, with their inherent politics of fear, oppression and othering.

Stories of these deeply troubled Othering times served to strengthen Alterotopians affirmative and celebratory longing to belong to past and future generations, in joyful entanglements with the temporalities of other beings and material presences.

Alterotopian Earthling Chant

We long to belong to past and future generations. We resonate with the temporalities of other beings and material presences. We joyfully entangle with what is other, ambiguous and unknown. We share our grief and rage. We celebrate our muddy ties to places, soils and rivers. We acknowledge the ways in which they hold and empower us, while we become other.