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Dear Readers,
“Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)”, a song that has been sung around the world since its first recording in 1956, seems to be the most honest and simple answer to the question of what the future holds. It is a question most often asked at the moment of breakthrough, or when we begin to witness some decline (small, private, global, or in the face of a crisis that affects us all). However, there is hope in asking this question: The change that awaits us in the future may, after all, be a change for good, visible only when it becomes the past and its effects have become visible.
And that is why in this issue we look ahead with an awareness of what lies behind us. Old visions of the future remind us that reality defies all projections. And what will be will be.
Magda from Pismo (Warsaw)
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Top Image: GERMANY / Departure board of Berlin's famous Tegel Airport shortly before its final closure in 2020. At the time of its creation in the 1970s, Tegel was a pioneering concept that prioritized short distances, which worked well throughout its useful life. 2020-2021, Andreas Gehrke / Berlin
Bottom Image: JAPAN / Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro and android Geminoid HI-1, (Intelligent Robotics Laboratory), Waseda University in Tokyo. 2010, Vincent Fournier / Paris
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The Rhône glacier in the Swiss Alps, which is partially covered with white tarpaulins to prevent the glacier cave, which is used for tourism, from melting. Based on paleoclimatic studies, it is assumed that the glacier will disappear in the near future. 2022, Jan Richard Heinicke / Dortmund
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Model of the headquarters of the Third International. The Project “Lost Horizon” visualizes half-forgotten traces and ruins of Soviet architecture and technical buildings, which once symbolically affirmed the technical advances of the communist future.
Moscow, 2016, Danila Tkachenko / Milano
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Members of ZEGG (Center for Experimental Cultural Design), a community project of about 100 people trying to create a model of an ideal society: Sustainable living,
leaderless structures, a life free of stigma — from celibacy to polyamory.
Kseniia Apresian / Berlin
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View from a window of the "Tours Aillaud" residential complex in Nanterre, built between 1973 and 1981. At the time of construction, the colourful and unusual towers, which provide space for about 1,500 tenants, were hailed as futuristic and innovative. Now, low-income families, the elderly, and immigrants predominate in the residential towers, and they have become a social hotspot in need of renovation. 2016, Laurent Kronental / Paris
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The US Reaper drone being promoted at a drone festival in the Netherlands. This drone is 11 metres long and 20 metres wide, can be armed with a variety of munitions, including Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs, and operates using 368 different cameras. The Netherlands has bought eight of these drones altogether. Drones are expected to be used more and more in future wars. 2019, Sas Schilten / Eindhoven
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Romanian women who practice fortune telling and witchcraft professionally are the subject of this photo series, entitled Vrăjitoare. Today these women no longer walk the streets in search of suitable palms to read Instead, clients seek them out via adverts in the media or social networks, then visit them in their splendid houses. 2013-2017, Lucia Sekerková / Stará Turá
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Imagining alternative futures has been one of humankind’s favourite pursuits since the beginning of time. Despite our obsession with ‘what’s-to-come’, predicting the future has become an industry that capitalises on uncertainty, seeking not just to determine the ‘not-yet’ and the ‘to-come’ but to turn speculation into a for-profit business venture. The future has become regulated by the powerful few, leaving the rest unable to escape our predetermined paths. Along these lines, British-Ghanaian writer Kodwo Eshun argues that it is increasingly difficult to imagine a world that does not deny alternative futures (other than the one desired by the status quo), or one where the future is not only predetermined but also managed in advance.
This linear understanding of progressing into new futures—where only trajectories of profit-making, productivity, growth, and accumulation are cherished—needs to be contested. What may seem to be bold (and exciting to some) steps into novel futures may be just another series of illusions. Renewable and truly clean futures are incompatible with what we may now understand as sustainable solutions, from electric cars to other seemingly green (but not green enough) energy (re)sources.
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What may seem to be bold (and exciting to some) steps into novel futures may be just another series of illusions.
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But even when the future is certain—for instance, we have never been more sure about the prospect of an ecological apocalypse—the world is still largely idle and inert. Governments and organisations watch passively as the world we know is changing (burning?), with the chances of redemption nowhere to be seen. The bottom line, as pointed out by astrophysicist Martin Rees, is that as we imagine different versions of the future, we must acknowledge the importance of acting in the present: “The future is in our hands, and the stakes are higher than ever before. That’s what we need to realise, and these things need to be higher on everyone’s agenda.”
Of course, we do not need a crystal ball to tell us that there is no planet B. Yet, who has the time and energy to think about the future, let alone act, when our existence has been turned upside down? In a time of disintegrating dreams and prospects, the failure of traditional liberal ideology, the rise of extremist neo-fascist movements, the danger of profound environmental crises, the dilemma of the nation state as a relic of the past, and the uncertainty triggered by AI technologies, it may be that even the possibility of fantasising about the future has become irrelevant. What can we make of our futures, after all?
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Laura from Kajet (Romania)
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The futuristic kites of Alexander Graham Bell
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Alexander Graham Bell was an inventor whose ideas and approaches to their application reached far into the future. He is best known for developing the telephone, for which he was the first to receive a US patent in 1876.
But he is also known for his work in the field of aerodynamics. This series of photographs shows Bell and his colleagues demonstrating and testing various kite designs, all based on the tetrahedral structure, whose pyramidal cells particularly appealed to Bell because they could divide the joints and spars, reducing the weight-to-surface area ratio.
Bell began his experiments with tetrahedral box kites in 1898 and eventually developed elaborate structures consisting of several composite tetrahedral kites covered with maroon silk designed to carry a human through the air. Named Cygnet I, II, and III (because they launched from water), these giant tetrahedral creatures were flown both unmanned and manned during the five years from 1907 to 1912.
The images, which make the kites seem especially futuristic when pictured alongside the clothing of the time, are taken from Bell's own private diaries and from articles (from 1903 and 1907) in National Geographic Magazine.
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THE LOCATIONS OF THIS ISSUE
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Photographers: Andreas Gehrke, Vincent Fournier, Jan Richard Heinicke, Danila Tkachenko, Kseniia Apresian, Laurent Kronental, Sas Schilten, Lucia Sekerková
Text authors: Petrică Mogoș and Laura Naum
Editorial team: Laura Naum and Petrică Mogoș (Kajet Journal), Karolina Mazurkiewicz, Magdalena Kicińska (Pismo Magazin), Stefan Günther and Anastasia Anisimova (n-ost) and Ramin Mazur.
Design: Philipp Blombach, Ramin Mazur
Copy Editing: Ben Knight
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