Last week I gave a keynote at the fantastic Electricdreams (Sognielecttrici) film festival and conference in Milan. This was the third year the festival was running, with a conference theme of ‘Conflicts and Margins: Imagining Otherness, Ecocatastrophes, Perpetual War, Technological Imbalance, and Systemic Injustice Through Speculative Fiction’.
My talk was called ‘Salvaging the Future: Speculative Exercises in World(un)building’. It asked:
How do we save the world? Can we salvage it instead? (Un)building on previous work linking salvage-Marxism and the fictions of Rivers Solomon (de Bruin-Molé 2021), and engaging closely with critical perspectives on salvage and unbuilding, this talk considers the concept of ‘salvage’ as utopian and explores how this practice has been implemented in moments of crisis and conflict across contemporary architecture, conservation, and speculative fiction and practice. Salvage offers up alternative frameworks for imagining utopias – and utopian activist practice – that are not defined by hope, futurity, or universalism.
You can download the full transcript of the talk here (full references are absent, please contact me to for details). A copy of my slides can be found on Google Slides.
A massive thank you to all the attendees for brilliant company and conversation, and to the organizers (Stefano Locati, Elisabetta Di Minico, and Federico Selvini) for their generous and supportive hosting.