STREAM: rA/Upture conference

The conference rA/Upture: xenofuturities_specters_anachrony will be streamed online on October 3rd and 4th 2020 from nadaLokal.

The event was originally conceived as part of the accompanying program of the exhibition: “Leaning on the Past, Working for the Future” which would have taken its physical form at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in June 2020 but, due to covid-19, was adequated to an online-only presence. This exhibition was organised in the framework of the OFF-Biennale Budapest 2020. It was set to investigate aesthetic strategies that target the conditioning of cultural identity and partly based on the Hungarofuturist Manifesto from 2017 that has since then evolved into a broader movement.

Description: Middle-eastern European states face, as well as countless democratic systems all over the world, the problem of right wing rhetoricians who try to secure and hold on to over-identified ideologies.
Nationalist ideology has occupied and co-opted our national and historical myths, therefore we must take them back so as to rebuilt progressive forms of thinking origin and belonging. By shooting up this raptured national identities into space we can loosen the temporality of the nation, allowing us to reimagine history, tearing space time apart, opening psychogeographical landscapes to otherworldly encounters – from here on out, the fictive past and an even more speculative future shall help us reappropriating the task of constructing narratives of identity.

For this, we have elaborated the term dis_rapture, which resonates with the title of our symposium. This notion shall be investigated in relation to the terms that embody our subtitle: xenofuturities, specters and anachrony. Dis_rapture is defined as the disruptive act which ruptures predominant ideologies of rapture. By uncovering and splitting the inherent duality of rapture, and by decoupling it from its ideological stagnation we shall unravel its potential for becoming and foster the exponential growth of different perspectives on identity and well-being. The strategy of identity construction shall be reappropriated as a disruptive tool. The rigid borders set around cultural memory define and encode progressive agendas. Our task is to uncover this vague promises of endless ongoing progress and rapture.

dis_rapture of xenofuturities dis_rapture of specters dis_rapture of anachrony

The conference was developed under the guidance of Technologie und das Unheimliche, a Berlin-Budapest-Elsewhere based publishing project and cross-disciplinary movement, which published the HUNGAROFUTURIST manifesto in 2017.

Hungarofuturism is a young example which executes ideas of alternative cultural and identical becoming: “Within the xenoaesthetic transformation, national identity becomes a stranger to itself, and we come to live in a space of liminality, in which the search for exceptionality is deconstructed, along with humanist and universalist illusions pertaining to the importance of humanity in the cosmos.”

This is only one example of many still to emerge dis_raptive techniques; its goal is the transformation of imagination in both a spacial and a temporal sense. Hungarofuturism acts through a creative re- channeling of narratives of origin and a restoration of hope in futures past or even speculative utopian futures that never have been or will ever be.

rA/Upture, the leitmotif of our conference is the vocal amalgam of the words rapture and rupture.

By extracting the prefix dis- from the double negation disruption and attaching it to the other composite rapture, we are trying to launch a deconstructive analysis of contemporary tendencies by using the term: dis_rapture.

dis_rapture implies the intentional, hypothetical deconstruction of ideologies that may have already manifested themselves in critical discourse. By using dis_rapture as a method we encourage the development of a variety of ideas we could have about the future and the past.