Set in an unspecified future, Josephin Hanke’s work LEADERS* is a science fiction series surrounding its protagonists’ (avatars) struggle for freedom within a dystopian world. In the course of the first episode, titled Fermented Prospects, NN—a figure that seems to have directly emerged from Ulrike Ottinger’s subversive and magical film cosmos—collects data chips from three robots with whom she immediately forms a conspiratorial alliance. The avatars’ subversive behavior is accompanied by an erotic exchange that mutates into their form of communication and resistance. While trying to survive in the capitalist’s ruins they have inherited, they embark on a quest for collective futurity, performed and embodied as a constant longing for a utopian togetherness.

Fermented Prospects takes the viewer to a realm in which time doesn’t move according to linearity, but to a construction similar to what the Cuban American theorist, José Esteban Muñoz, defines as queerness’s time: “Queerness’s time is a stepping out of the linearity of straight time. Straight time is a self-naturalizing temporality. Straight time’s ‘presentness’ needs to be phenomenologically questioned, and this is the fundamental value of a queer utopian hermeneutics. Queerness’s ecstatic and horizontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world.” If queerness’s temporality doesn’t live in the here and now of every day’s linear time construction, but in the constant and horizontal negotiation of desire and desiring, as Muñoz suggests, survival, not only for Hanke’s avatars, might only be a successful endeavor, if performed through collectivity and love. A perhaps crucial path to exit the unresolved past turned into a-far-too-well recognizable present dystopia.
 

Eli Cortiñas, Soft Capsules,

Kunstverein Braunschweig

2021