"What Would a World Without Genocide Look Like?" Tamar Boyadjian, Hyperallergic
What does the world look like from a SWANA (South West Asian and North African) futurist perspective? Can we envision a future of mutual support and a flowering of our diverse and shared cultures, in the shadow of turmoil caused by the lingering effects of imperialism in countries from Armenia to Afghanistan to Palestine and Syria? Can we preserve a connection to our ancestors while encouraging the evolution of our societies? This sweeping project imagines the future and envisions creating it, encompassing land back, reparations, ethnic and cultural diversity, ancestral practices, and our shared SWANA culture. In short, SWANA futurism.
Much of this work occupies multiple temporalities. While disorienting time and space as we take control of our own narratives, we experience past, present, and future at once, much as our ancestral divination practices harness a nonlinear understanding of time, and simultaneous occupation of spaces. Experience a family’s return to their ancestral village, a reckoning with a past they believed was lost. Witness ancestors who faced a violent, colonial past stepping out of vintage photos into a tumultuous present to reassert agency over their own stories. Experience the emotions embodied in a Memory Shard embossed with the soil of ancestral lands or the imprint of a child’s slipper brought from a lost homeland. Meet the people who came together in places rich with human history to create contemporary portraits of diversity and friendship. Imagine a different world. Travel to a fictional homeworld where past and future come together in dreamlike combinations. Join in the ritual of hospitality as both host and honored guest.
Welcome to my world of indigeneity and diaspora. Dream with me.