fresh fermented futures

How can we think of futures for ourselves and our own region that are fully new and flourishing from the local context? In a globalized world, with histories of oppression and todays hostage of a capitalist system we didn't choose, how could we regain agency to think of a tomorrow immanent from the materialities and thought processes from our village, neighborhood, ecology?

Philosopher Yuk Hui talks about cosmotechnics as the need of plurality to solve the current polycrisis we are facing, breaking the idea of an unified narrative (mostly westerned-based) of what is considered progress and development, technology and tools. He argues for cosmopolitics instead, as a way to overcome the consequences of this unified world brought by globalization, not just of commerce and rotten economic/financial models we are trapped in, but also to break free from the stories we are living in. Domination, extractivism, positivism and so many other isms, with no acceptance of alternative ways of knowing and doing, the constant good-versus-bad approach to everything.

What if the world is not a problem to be solved but a forest of polarities to be managed? A multiplicity of tensions locked in a perpetual dance together, solutions not as a goal to achieve but as a process to be crafted locally, appropriately and including as many view points, voices and ways of being as possible. Decolonizing both science and politics towards more relational understandings of the environment around us. Qualitative and subjective, rather than the obsession with the quantitative and the objective as the only references to live by and organize our societal structures around.

A living cactus instead of a plastic flower. Resilient and rough, a living being/becoming, instead of attempts of shininess and superficial perfection. Not excluding different perspectives – including the ones of the current story of modernity – but expanding our views outwards and downwards, to the grassroots level and the compost piles, expansive rather than expensive, honoring the microbiomes in our society that help decompose and fertilize the new.

What could be fresh fermented futures for our world? Hyper-localized and real, smelly, as in, not sterile, tamed, or stuck in time, but salty, messy, fully embracing authenticity and the plurality of what's possible. Healthy and regenerative, fermented as they are based on patience and trusting the process, with a foundation of kinship with more-than-human beings, collaborating with us on the micro level. Sustainable and punk with a DIY aesthetics and ethics, appropriate to place, as in fermentation as source of nutrition throughout the year in a safe manner, but also fresh, as new, coming from the soil and seasoned with the rawness of everyday life. Alive.

Donna Haraway, the cybernetic ecofeminist, digested an entire world of compost to fertilize the word chthulucene, as "alternative narratives about a transcorporeal planetary kinship and human/nonhuman cocreations of other futurities than the human-centered ones." Translation? It's in the messy grounds of multispecies collaborations that the most interesting futures can be harvested. How can we cultivate this social soil around us, the fallow land left by the community to rest in order to regain fertility? Focusing on breaking the current monoculture mindset, cross-pollinating between cultures, between species, between fields: science, arts, ecology, philosophy, Indigenous and traditional knowledge systems and other place-based wisdom – all different expressions of our desire to thrive, all alternative lenses to look at the world around us.

Anthropocene made our planet fragile. In constant need of growth and able to breakdown at any time from all the important details pushed aside, externalities left out of the accountant spreadsheet, silenced as utopian nonsense by the politician speech. Without the connection to place, to others, to nature, to the whole, we continue to wonder about our failings with the climate and our declining mental health. We continue to wander in a nihilistic path where everything is seen as a thing to exploit rather than a someone to create a relationship with. The tree of our childhood memories, the chicken sacrificed to a forest spirit, the river giving us life and sediments, the constellation of bacteria we use at home to ferment a food, distill a mood, part of our living family in constant exploration together (and with the rest.)

As Hui said, we need to bridge the gap between aggressive global competition and isolating relativism. We need to think of our "tech+art+craft+social+etc making" as marrying us again with the cosmos, not shying away from rejecting universalisms and embracing what is created and shaped locally, deeply embedded, soaked and fermented by the smelly juice of cultures rooted in place, materialities and microorganisms. Digestion and creation are always localized but open to the world. He suggests that we cannot solve the current climate/political/... crisis by more technological solutions continuing the current paradigm, or by closing ourselves back in cultural identities; we need to pluralize ourselves, our tools, our methods, our ways of seeing, being, making. We need to reinvent ourselves anchored in place, localized ways of co-creating in relation, respecting ecological limits and spiritual requirements, treating everything as subjects to negotiate with, instead of machines to be fixed or resources to be taken advantage off. Then we can compost towards co-existence, planetary thinking as he defines it, venturing beyond native states to embrace cognitive diversity, biodiversity, technodiversity, cultural diversity. Futures diversity.

Plurality as the rhizomatic answer against the monoquestion of our current way of being. We want to be forest, not plant pots growing apart and locked in a everlasting sad search for a common soil. Letting ourselves being fertilized by other species, other nutrients, other cosmologies. Fermenting ways of thinking and acting upon the world. Indigenous knowledge systems, deeper ecological thought processes, decentralized ontologies, future forward agencies and imaginaries – not afraid to crossbreed, but always honoring the roots to create the fruits. And keeping ourselves light enough to be permanently changing, moving, mutating. There is no spreading seeds without wind and its whispering wisdom...