In this anthology, we collectively offer catharsis, cautionary tales, hidden hopes, spiritual beliefs or dreams of the future, past or parallel present. We hope this offering finds a home in the hearts, hard drives and ethereal playgrounds of those who have been building the world, fighting injustice and soothing historic hurts. The extent of what you receive from the creative expressions we have collected, we could only (and happily) speculate. Our Move Next.
Who are we?
Backyard Pitch is a queer bipoc social impact business based in Cape Town, South Africa. Our vision is a Global South where people are supported to move through and thrive beyond colonial legacies and structural injustices. Our mission is to collaborate with communities to re-energize cultural movements and expression, towards a future of our own imaginings. Check out our other projects at thenewnormalgame.co.za and untilweremember.co.za
Contributions to Our Move Next:
Current mainstream narratives on speculation and futurism are often capitalist and hegemonic with Africa being either immaterial or mythified, stripped of nuance and continually framed as a vacant space where natural resources are up for grabs.
Speculative fiction allows for so much more than the nightmare-scapes born of capitalist machinations a la Elon Musk’s ideas on a millionaires mission to Mars or even the slick hi-tech vibranium fuelled afro-fantasy of Black Panther.
Our Move Next is an invitation for activists and organisers to explore speculative narratives led by their own action and their own embodied ideas around what the world is and how it was, how the world could change and what it will look, feel and smell like when it does.
The invitation for this book is not for contributors to create false positives. This is a provocation to explore depictions of futures, socio-historical imaginings and alternative realities with the room to consider all kinds of alternate possibilities that sometimes the rigid framework of daunting social realism does not often accommodate.
We believe that Our Move Next creates the unique opportunity for contributors and readers to engage in justice -oriented creative social exploration.This is an opportunity to shift paradigms, honouring movement and world building work happening across borders.
Provocative Questions:
These are a few questions that might spur on some creative thinking, also check out this link if you’re looking for a bit of a field guide.
- How do I view the current world? How do I relate to it?
- How do I imagine/conceive the future? What are my worries and my hopes and interests, what are the challenges that terrify me and possibilities that inspire me?
- What kind of world am I hoping to build through the work I do/ the way I live my life? What does it look like, feel like, smell like? Who am I in relation to it?
- How do I imagine/re-imagine my history/histories that is different to the ways they have been told/shown?
- What kind of imaginative alternatives do I dream of/ What kind of worlds would I want to build if there were absolutely no limits?