EMILY LARNED INTRODUCES ILSSA & Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior

Two upcoming events at apexart in conjunction with the Bad at Sports exhibition Don't Piss On Me And Tell Me It's Raining, running through May 22:

1. EMILY LARNED INTRODUCES ILSSA

Tuesday, May 18: 6 pm

Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts is a membership organization for those who make experimental or conceptual work with obsolete technology. Impractical Labor is a protest against contemporary industrial practices and values. Instead it favors independent workshop production by antiquated means in relatively limited quantities. Economy of scale goes out the window, as does the myth that time must equal money. Impractical Labor seeks to restore the relationship between a maker and her tools; a maker and her time; a maker and what she makes. The process is the end, not the product. Impractical Labor is idealized labor: the labor of love.

2. Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior


Saturday, May 22: 4-6 pm

Thom Donovan and Sreshta Rit Premnath of Museo magazine will interview artists about future projects that will never happen. The interviews will present futures which never came to pass, but may still hold the potential to be realized in the present. By producing an archive of futures which have yet to come to pass perhaps it is possible to alter the course of the future, as well as change the way we narrate and remember the past.

The tense of the future anterior (French: Future auxiliary verb + past participle) is one of potentiality. Within any given present, it images "what will have been" before an event actually comes to pass. To return to the moments of bifurcation is an objective of the archive of the future anterior. An archive which wishes to serve less as a time-capsule than a provisional index of loss or misplaced futures; where future has not yet become past and multiple futures remain compossible within a single present.