The Art Corner: Lalin Akalan
For the last art corner of the year, we look at world building as a practice of freedom, and how creativity, activism and art are hope encapsulated.
“In the year 3074, an extinction-level event took place. One of Planet Earth’s ‘time-space portal generator laboratories’ accidentally released an experimental gravitational liquid and triggered a chain reaction. The leaking plasma modified the fabric of all matter it came into contact with.
The plasma contained a hyper-dimensional compatibility upgrade code. It was designed to create a consolidated dynamic communication channel between universes, to form a fixed intersection bubble — a meeting point — so that civilizations could learn from each other and assist in times of crisis.
But the code malfunctioned.”
Welcome to the Deep Forgetting, a period of history where there is no recollection of what happened, and no technology can access it. As people woke up from this generational slumber, I met with the creator of this world: Lalin Akalan.
We met in front of a glass of red wine and a tortilla, a typical Spanish late afternoon snack and if narratives had a luminous white colour, there must have been a carpet of them weaved on top of our heads as the night went on.
Akalan wears many hats, she tells me, and has difficulty describing herself as one thing. If I were to describe her, I would say she is a curator of worlds. With a background in art curation and an innate curiosity of the technological, coupled with a brilliant mind and kind heart, Akalan is trying to help us understand the new technologies and the world through a creative and artistic lens.
“It’s not just talking about new technologies, and how that correlates with art and creativity, but also trying to spread awareness about how it’s affecting our daily lives,” she says when I ask her about her work in xtopia, a worldbuilding initiative that focuses on creativity, immersive experiences, technologies and discourses around humanity. She calls it a social dreaming collective. “So we are trying to connect with the creative and the creative community and make sense of things together, but at the same time, trying to create joint ventures with the community. Sort of like a big laboratory process,” she tells me.
“To keep imagination alive as much as technology as a forefront player in this is to stay as human as possible” Lalina Akalan
What I love about Akalan’s work is that although sometimes it may seem abstract and conceptual, it is actually grounded in the everyday. She is curious and so knowledgeable, to the point that, after our interview, I had to read all the books and academic papers she mentioned to me during our encounter. . Between one glass and another, Akalan taught me about the colonisation of the nervous system, sound as warfare, and how to build a world through utopic eyes.
But what exactly is Worldbuilding? It is defined as “the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as history, geography, and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers.” This practice is usually seen as something that writers do, but many people like Akalan have been elevating the concept to step outside of that.
interpreting text. See full video here.
When I think about what science fiction has done to imagine new worlds and to bring forth the issues that humanity faces as a collective, I cannot but think of dystopic futures. Dune, Planet of The Apes, Star Wars; a lot of the time there is imminent destruction before some heroes save the day (usually through a war). The danger of thinking of dystopic futures and reproducing them in books or movies, thus making them entertaining, is that we may romanticise them, or fear them deeply, and therefore choose to detach from them as something distant from us. The climate emergency is a daily reality for many people living under the threat of hurricanes, tsunamis and flooding, it is not far away. Art, imagination and a curious approach like that of Akalan can really work towards realising that action is needed right now.
The reality is that activists, writers, artists and thinkers all over the world are constantly building worlds in their work. “To keep imagination alive as much as technology as a forefront player in this is to stay as human as possible, and it will help” Akalan said in Sonar Istanbul 2018 when speaking about humans adapting to cultural diversification in the future. Art and creativity are ways of imagining, and one of the principles that guide this very column. In the same conference, a narrative was woven when technological writer Ben Vickers who deeply related to Akalan’s words, said “Art is a game where the game is to constantly change the rules and the parameters of what the game is whilst playing.”
Feminism is a practice of worldbuilding as well. It is a process rooted in questioning the injustices of this world and imagining one where these don’t exist. Imagination is at the root of activism; not the ephemeral and conceptual imagination, but what is required for humans to think and achieve things that are out of the norm. There is no real structural change that doesn’t begin with imagination. Lola Olufemi describes this brilliantly in her book Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting power: “Feminism is a political project about what could be. It’s always looking forward, invested in futures we can’t quite grasp yet. It’s a way of wishing, hoping, aiming at everything that has been deemed impossible.”
Feminism is a practice of worldbuilding as well. It is a process rooted in questioning the injustices of this world and imagining one where these don’t exist.
Akalan’s passion for worldbuilding, and her curiosity to understand the human experience through an artistic lens is at the base of her latest project. She also deeply understands the necessity of knowledge when it comes to a rapidly changing world. “I’m also just genuinely scared to not be able to speak a language that’s constantly daily being built with new terminologies, “ she says in reference to growing technologies, “and I feel like if we don’t go through this process of knowledge building, a couple of decades down the line we might not know how things are made.”
“Dangerous technologies are numerous, but at the same time, one can have the freedom to choose to be dangerous, if one knows what the thing is about,” she reassures.
Her company xtopia is building a world called Ancient Futures where the future is built whilst remembering the past. I see a parallel here with a lot of work that is done in climate change by studying and learning from indigenous knowledge when it comes to protecting the earth. Ancient Futures is a theme park consisting of large scale art installations and immersive experiences in central Istanbul, xtopia re-imagines the historical Cemil Topuzlu Amphitheater as an archaeological site from the future. It will host the work of various local artists but also aims to bring the work online so other artists not based in Instanbul can participate.
The current capitalist patriarchal system is lost in a Deep Forgetting where we fail to remember that things like community, love as a practice of freedom, equality and preserving the planet are incredibly important for our survival. It is clear we need to reinvent some things moving forward, Akalan’s curation work is doing the incredibly necessary work of reminding us to imagine a future without forgetting the past or detaching from our human side. And to do it with love.
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