Time’s Up Newsletter – Dec 2018

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Von Valletta nach Wien und fehlenden Weihnachtsgeschenken

Liebe LeserInnen,

anbei noch ein paar Zeilen aus unseren Werkstätten bevor sich das Jahr in die Festtage verabschiedet – zu welchen wir alles Gute wünschen!

Operation Malta abgeschlossen
Nach 33 Monaten regelmäßiger und abwechselnd langer Aufenthalte in Malta, Gozo und Comino händigten wir erst kürzlich den gepackten 12m Container unserem maltesischen Transport-Koordinator aus. Womit wir offiziell die mehrjährigen Projekte Presents of the Future (als Teil des Kulturprogramms des europäischen Ratsvorsitzes Maltas) und Cabinet of Futures (als Programmpunkt der europäischen Kulturhauptstadt Valletta 2018) zu einem erfolgreichen Ende brachten. Bemerkenswert im dreijährigen Projektverlauf war sicherlich die Chance auf eine eingehende Beschäftigung mit den Beschaffenheiten des Landes. Mit seiner hohen Bevölkerungsdichte, den politisch brisanten Gegebenheiten und schwierigen ökologischen Voraussetzungen zeigte sich sowohl die Insel als solche als besonders geeignet, als auch Teile der Bevölkerung die Thematik wünschenswerter Zukünfte sehr interessiert aufnahmen. In zahlreichen Diskussionsveranstaltungen und Workshops im Kontext der Ausstellungen Cabinet of Futures und Presents of the Futures beschäftigten wir uns mit Themenbereichen wie Quality of Life, Radical Recycling / Circular Economy, Fair Food & Clean Cargo – alles Inhalte die mitnichten abgeschlossen sind in unserem Tun! Finden schliesslich diese Inhalte und noch etliche mehr soeben eine nahtlose Fortsetzung in unserem Beitrag zur Vienna Biennale 2019.

Giant 3D Tetris

Setting up a show is somehow always a long process of joy: a pile of what Philip K. Dick would call kipple, or our lifter operator Joe wanted to call “the sort of junk that fills my garage,” turns into an exhibition, a parallel universe that, in this case, represented the imagination of a town in 2047. Seeing the look on Joe’s face when he visited the exhibition opening was a joy; he was amazed what it had all turned into. And we are every time too.

Time’s Up out!

Almost three years of being on and off Malta, Gozo and Comino are coming to an end.

Time’s Up Starschnitt

There doesn’t seem to exist a word for “Starschnitt” in English – a real tragedy I dare to say! Especially since Time’s Up produced one which is, by receiving the fourth and last seasonal postcard of 2018 today, complete!

 

Cabinet Of Futures – Once upon a time

Once upon a time in a land far, far away beyond the south coast of Sicily, Time’s Up set up an experiential future. And the incredible rumor goes, that the immersive environment, including lots and lots of technology and media-enrichments and called Cabinet of Futures, used to be switched on and off with a single tiny button on a remote control…

The extraordinary story even continues, saying, that for the complete period of three months the show was open to public – the simple one-button switching on/off procedure never failed! Truth or Fairy Tale?????

 

More Practical Utopias in mind

After a first glimpse into ideas and examples in relation to Fair Food and Clean Cargo on Friday night (some notes about that in a different blog-post) by Jean-Marc Bonello, involved in the Low Carbon Shipping project, Emanuela De Giorgio running The Veg Box and Stephen La Rosa from the Mediterranean Culinary Academy, we continued for another two days with some collective fabulations of the „Yet to Be“ with a number of everyday life experts being interested and involved in the subject of of Fair Food // Clean Cargo on diverse levels.

Practical Utopia from Afar

 While we hope rarely to need a doctor, we do need a farmer three times a day. And with 90% of everything coming by ship, it seems we are immersed in a world of food and cargo, two parts of our culture that are hidden from view. Over the past weekend we have dived into these invisible and unknown fields with presentations and futuring exercises exploring the way food and cargo has been, is and might be. On Friday we enjoyed a public talk about Fair Food & Clean Cargo, we will report on the exercises soon.

On Friday evening Greta Muscat Azzopardi from The Amber Spark brought together three local and empassioned voices to speak about the Maltese and international elements of food and cargo.

[Announcement]: Final Malta-Activities / Letzte Malta-Aktivitäten

Cabinet of Futures being on display since 24th of August in the second floor of Ċentru San Ġużepp Ħaddiem 71, Triq Bwieraq, Birkirkara (which is really difficult to find if you don’t use the directions given here in this link..) will be open for only a few more last days …

More Images to be found here

Time’s Up’s Public Relations…

… for more than 20 years we have, according to a good friend and expert in the field of communications, always been “Ambiguous and Incomplete”. Some might see the correlation with the title of our recently published book….

Students imagining Futures

We have had another „vision-rich“ day yesterday. Starting off with almost 80 secondary school students visiting Cabinet of Futures in the morning we saw wonderful ideas emerging around how we can walk towards a cleaner and healthier future, encompassing everything between more pragmatic up to highly fabulating visions including technological inventions bringing up new materials instead of plastics for packaging up to unicorns magically reforesting woodlands.

Cabinet of Futures in Context

When we first arrived here in Malta over two years ago, we met a wonderful range of people, from poets and publishers to curators and academics. Some of them we have hardly seen again, others have helped us create a series of events, projects, exhibitions and workshops over the past two years that have taught us a lot about what we can do as well as opening, apparently, a lof of other eyes to what is possible and even preferable.

Improved Quality of Life in possible futures

The Practical Utopian Directorate has opened it’s doors for the second time while Cabinet of Futures is set up in Malta! During the weekend we have been facilitating two separate workshops focussing on „Quality of Life / Small is Beautiful“.

After getting attuned to some economic perspectives on „Small is Beautiful“ by Marie Briguglio and Margarete Camillero Fenech at Studio Solipsis (organised by KOPIN Malta) on Friday we continued with the facilitation of „A Practical Utopian Moment“ on Saturday and with „An Afternoon Spent in a Practical Utopian State of Mind“ on Sunday.