Many Of Them / 12

Many of them / 12

With a forward-looking ethos in mind, MANY OF THEM #12 embraces the concept of redreaming, a notion explored by Nigerian poet and novelist BEN OKRI, which refers to the act of reactivating our capacity to dream alternative futures and images yet to be seen. In a cultural landscape overwhelmed by the incessant flood of pictures, algorithmic surveillance, copy-paste media creation processes, and the commodification of desire, redreaming new futures becomes a catalyst for change, allowing for a radical reawakening. As OKRI tells HANS ULRICH OBRIST, “We are still primitives to the powers of dreaming and redreaming our possibilities as a species”—we have yet to fully embrace our multidimensionality.

Redreaming is a political and ontological repositioning that invites us to question the forms through which reality has been historically constructed, constrained, and represented. The artists and thinkers in this issue propose shifting the terms of understanding, unpacking our shared fears about the future, and bringing poetry to the activist site. Across disparate media and from wildly different backgrounds—whether looking within or looking without—they propose an awe-inspiring range of ways to redream what comes next. This is not an escape, but a reconstruction. We must look at the world with new eyes.

 

___

 

Many of Them Magazine is a diary in the strict sense of the term. A homage to those generations that over the years faxe the world trying to believe in themselves.