*Staying afloat, floating, suspended, airy, a way of navigating the currents, not drowning
With afloat, we continuously reflect on endings: what they signify, our vulnerability to them, the inherent injustices of our comfortable existence on this planet, the embodiment of our fleshy reality, and how we mourn. This ongoing contemplation of the boundaries of our mortality has led us to collect fragments of text, ideas from various thinkers, and some images.
Patricia Marx. Bunker Mentality, Shopping for a home at the end of the world. August 2024, The New Yorker.
"Storytelling for Earthly Survival" was an elective MA class held at the Royal Academy of Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, in February 2023, and at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, Netherlands, in June 2023.
With an imminent “apocalypse” coming and survival tactics and lifestyles permeating our cultural and political scenarios, thinking about the end has become, as Mark Bould argues, the central subject of our collective unconscious. From the end of a stable climatic condition, and massive extinctions to the downfall of global capitalist economies, the end of life as we know it is deemed terrifying. Still, this way of conceiving our relationship with the end serves to think critically about the underlying power structures that hold together problematic practices today.
Storytelling for earthly survival was structured as a workshop to critically explore ideas of survival, climate catastrophe and anthropocentrism. In the course, participants explored speculative writing and feminist methodologies as worldbuilding practices to produce a series of texts that delve into ecological violence, non-linear narratives and the urgencies of the climate emergency.
Throughout the course, students delved into fictional storytelling across both sound and written mediums. These narratives were presented in intimate settings, encouraging discussions and explorations of publishing as a collective practice. Through their imaginative storytelling, participants illuminated the complexities of our current environmental challenges and offered glimpses of alternative futures rooted in resilience and adaptation.
Workshop, Water Zines and Liquid Protocols, 2024
"Water Zines and Liquid Protocols" was an elective MA class offered at the Royal Academy of Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, in February 2024, and at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, Netherlands, in April 2024.
Structured as a collaborative workshop, this short course aimed to develop students' zine-making and publishing skills while focusing on watery entanglements, rising sea tides, survivalism and post-human theories. Throughout the course, students followed a series of liquid publishing protocols, enabling them to cultivate a critical voice and explore how water, as a storytelling device, prompts us to reconsider our relationship with the world around us.
Open Call: Fix-up #1: Endings
A “fix-up” is a format commonly used in Science Fiction. It consists of a series of short stories transformed into one novel. To make the novel coherent new connecting material or interstitial texts are added to the storyline. Also, fixing up often means making improvements or repairs to something as well as making arrangements to set something to function in a certain direction.
For the first fix-up published by afloat we are seeking for submissions of texts, images, scans, screenshots, or any other publishable material that delves into the concept of endings. Your stories and fragments will be woven together in a new narrative. Send us texts from 2 to a maximum of 500 words. We will fix them up and publish them in a printed publication.
Please send your endings, dessert recipes, breakup text messages, the last pages of your diary, images of your fossil collection, the last story you wrote, or the expiration date of all your skincare to earthafloat@gmail.com before July 1st.
The end is always the beginning of something else.
earthafloat@gmail.com
this project is generously supported by stimuleringsfonds