Let us call this moment of transition — from a roughly four-hundred-year-old rationalist epoch toward an unknown age — AfterWorld [PoslijeSvijet]. Instead of a catastrophe, the end perhaps opens up a possibility for us, as cultural workers, to shape artifacts that carry different values into the new epoch, introducing something unknown or magical into a plastic reality shaped by language. (Campagna, 2013) Magic as a network of relations, instead of the imperative of linear progression of economic-technological progress; as gestures of listening that precede any agreement; a ceding of space without knowing what will actually emerge. At a moment when what is recognizable to us is rapidly disappearing, we propose AfterWorld as a speculative, transportable object, or a bridge toward another world. Resisting canonization, it is an artifact that strives so that something — perhaps entirely unlike itself — might continue after it.

The many years of activity of the Improspekcije festival (whose changes brought the AfterWorld), as well as of the "independent" scene at large, through organizations and self-organized collectives and platforms, unfold without sufficient support from institutional infrastructures for performing artistic production. We collaborate with systems that were never conceived to listen to our needs, and which are themselves burdened by the sediments of transition and their own unresolved crises. Continuously, and with the exhaustion this entails, we imagine and build infrastructures that enable the right to artistic work for ourselves and others.

Infrastructure often becomes visible only once it stops functioning. Yet its functionality is never evenly distributed: for many, it is permanently violent or inaccessible. Around this dysfunctionality, however, structures emerge that — by imagining possibilities beyond what is available — sustain themselves. Whether they intend to or not, in doing so they sometimes also sustain the very conditions that gave rise to them.

When we speak of infrastructure, we mean the material conditions of work, but also a network of relations and actions: listening, ceding, trust. We draw on the tools of Marina Vishmidt, who shows that speculation is not opposed to the material, but can redirect existing infrastructural relations toward other possibilities. Conditions of possibility are not only that which supports something, but that which determines its limits. (Vishmidt, 2018)

Into the existing infrastructure of our festival, as well as of cultural production in general, we would like to introduce, and insist upon, the right to exhaustion; to weakness and incapacity; to a space-time not entirely subordinated to the legibility of the relations it produces; to spaces of alternative states of consciousness. And if this is not already understood as infrastructure — we would insist on it! We would like to practice sensing in order to address precisely the invisible, the inaccessible and the otherworldly, and to invite them into presence. We are interested in building porous and degradable structures and forms that do not rest on a demand for their own permanence, but rather on an understanding of finitude, interruption and disappearance. Through the performative apparatus, we extend questions about infrastructures of care toward uncovering the ways in which the idea of an infrastructure of motherhood is imprinted onto — or expelled from — various bodies. As in previous years, we continue our collaborations with artists, collaborators and spaces, but now as part of a more active imagining of an infrastructure of camaraderie.

Through the festival's curatorial thinking, we invite artists with whom we have already collaborated in the past, or those with whom we would like to build a long-term relationship — depositing thoughts, aesthetics, dialogues and experiences into relationships that extend beyond a single encounter.

The imaginary infrastructure of AfterWorld is, for us, a bridge on which we can temporarily stand. We are here, and we are here no longer. We let that be enough as a condition for that which does not yet have its form.