OBFUSCATION

READING AND WRITING

What should our imaginations be used for? What kinds of worlds and relationships should they help to bring?

In December 2019, the Defence Innovation Agency (AID) launched a public call to form a Red Team for the French army. On the website of the Ministry of Defence, we can read that its "mission is to imagine and create futuristic and disruptive scenarios for the benefit of defence innovation".

The imaginary is therefore a colony of control societies, the place where technological advances are thought, like drones, facial recognition, robotics, home automation, data recording, cybernetic prostheses, or sensors of all kinds, in order to push for the progress and the growth.

Chronotopium will be a club for the practice of the imaginary. The idea is to think about the imagination ability as a muscle to build up as if we were going in a fitness club. It is about putting in place practices of care and kinship, as well as poetic guerilla warfare, in order to help social and political struggles.

Chronotopium will be a space-time for play, a place to develop resistance, a point from which to spread our imaginations into the real. There, we will weave narratives, embroider them with a thousand sequins, ransack the language to extract fluids that will irrigate and foster tangible worlds.

Following this proposition we launched the club Chronotopium with some inhabitants of the zad (zone to defend) of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, North of Nantes in France. Our proposition for the Obfuscation Workshop's intervention is about this first experience and its future implications, in order to discuss the possibility of an autonomous imaginary and its political and social issues.