5.–21.12.2025

How can we imagine future in a time that seems determined by various crises? And what will be the role of artistic research in this? The exhibition in Kuva/Tila gallery 5–21 December is part of the sixth Research Pavilion.

Introduction

What will the future look like? How can we imagine future in a time that seems determined by various crises? And what will be the role of artistic research in this? Nowadays it turns out to be difficult to provide a meaningful answer to that kind of problem statements. It seems that such a thing as a future, or imagining another world, or speculating about it, has been completely taken away from us. At this point, as Boris Groys recently stated in Philosophy of Care, our only hope appears to be that life doesn’t get any worse than it already is.

In such a consolidating era, the desire emerges to rethink ideas that were formulated and imagined in times when the possibility of positive and progressive change was still self-evident. Roland Barthes’ text, How to Live Together, written in the rather optimistic 1970s, contains a series of inspiring ideas and propositions. Barthes attributes possibilities to what he describes as “idiorrhythmic practices”: a productive form of living together where one recognizes and respects the individual rhythms of the other; the possibility of a community in which everyone would follow their own rhythms, i.e. their “idiorrhythms,” instead of being subjected to a common regulation of life that they could not choose nor oppose. These practices, Barthes noticed, made it possible to find the right balance between life for oneself and life for the others.

With How to Live Together Barthes intended to open up space and time to reflect, to fantasize, to create simulations, before the process of imagination is disrupted by compelling demands for choices and priorities. Now, fifty years later, the question is: what is the value and significance of idiorrhythmic imagination in a world that, because of increased divisions and tensions, emphatically calls for clear positions on various planetary urgencies? But also: how can the current practice of artistic research provide an impetus for a necessary reassessment of this concept?

Exhibition

To further investigate these topical perspectives, Idiorrhythmic Imaginariespresents itself as a platform for knowledge in the making. Experimental modes of curating (performance, discursive events, other rituals of gathering, new modes of delivery and display) are sought that understand the exhibition as a potential mode of inquiry in itself: a research process that negotiates and articulates the assumption of a possible resonance between idiorrhythms and imaginaries in the hybrid environment of an exhibition and an event space.