Doors: 19:00 / Start time: 20:00
Location: Spektrum Berlin
28 September, 2016

XenoEntities Network (XEN) will gather for a session that precedes the screening of Future My Love, which will be screened the following evening. 

XEN Assemblage #2 will initiate a discussion on how social utopianism and modernist dreams intersect and influence human relationships alongside our relation to our bodies and identities. We propose a reading session that will bring to the table several books whose authors have approached these topics. We’ll discuss them while trying to find links and bridges within their discourses. 

The focus of this session will be on collective and personal utopias, and how the hypothetical construction of idealised futures shapes the forms of affective relationships, love, and pleasure. Refuting the pervaded queer pragmatism – fighting for legal rights such as same-sex marriage, gays in the military – we will embrace queer futurities by reading excerpts from Cruising Utopia from José Esteban Muñoz. “We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds,” he writes.

We will also be looking into some of the work from Feel Tank Chicago and their rendering of emotions – depression, anxiety, rage, numbness, fear and many other – as not only part of the personal sphere, but politically induced. “Can hopelessness be transformed? Is there anything useful about guilt? How might we collectivise our despair, and our joys? What’s YOUR utopia in need of a rescue?”

The reading material and videos we will present should hopefully function as a starting point for further discussion. We would like to encourage and invite participants to bring and share ideas, inputs and material they find relevant to this discussion.

XenoEntities Network’s assemblage format is a research and discussion gathering, free and openly accessible, in which every participant can propose debates on related topics and ideas, present works, and suggest future programs. We will have access to internet and video projection while snacks will be provided by Spektrum and there are drinks at the bar.