‘Let’s construct alternative worlds together’, I say as I try to convince my friends to come to the festival this summer. I tell the same to you, let’s gather in Austria and construct a possible world.
Sometimes it hurts to imagine a world that is so far away from the reality we currently inhabit; a year in which mass murder and war continues to happen in Gaza; as we witness the first year that breached the 1.5C degree average all year round; as we experience a shift to the right across Europe; as fossil industries continue to drill and exploit our earth and in turn cause it to warm and change impossibly. I look at this reality and think to myself that it’s a pretty bleak world we face. That if it continues to look like this, we don’t have much of a future to work with. The dystopian movies I grew up with have become reality it seems like. And I continue to ask myself why as a collective it is easier for us to imagine our demise, the apocalypse, the death of civilization, rather than a future we actually want to inhabit, a utopia not for some but for all.
And if I follow this train of thought further, I think that in this destructive reality we find ourselves in, we have to actively make space to imagine otherwise. To come together and decide that the status quo is no longer a world we consent to and that we will attempt to do something about it. I say attempt, because sometimes the task at hand seems impossible large. At other times, with hands joined in fight, it also does not. Yet one thing remains true, we can never do this work alone.
Imagination remains important even in broken worlds. Imagining otherwise is our task at hand. Since this summer when I first participated in the Alt Shift Festival, I’ve thought of the festival and our coming together as such an actively created space to imagine a world beyond capitalism, beyond colonialism, beyond extractivism, beyond exploitation and discrimination. In this one week in summer, we join hands in the cracks of this hurting system and ask ourselves, shyly and maybe boldly, what if another world is possible?
- Elena Blumenbach