Deconstructing Tech Futures: A Workshop on Critical Imagination was a workshop about power disbalances and the use of technologies for political participation.

In the processes of colonisation, imperial oppression, and forced erasure, entire indigenous cultures die out, languages are forgotten, and literatures disappear. Many indigenous people are forced to assimilate, losing their identities, and having to study and work using dominant languages. This leads to a future created by dominant voices. But whose stories haven’t been told and what technological ways are there that remain unimagined, are labelled as wild, rendered invisible, or known only to themselves, and not in other cultures and territories?

The conversational and imaginative workshop Deconstructing Tech Futures: A Workshop on Critical Imagination examined the role technologies play in reproducing power disbalances and reflects on how such technologies could be used for political participation. It addressed the need to deconstruct and shift the homogeneous dominant narratives of technological futures, to focus on exploring potentials and ways of fostering new world visions, as acts of self-empowerment and possibilities for change and political participation by those who have been excluded from the matrix of technological modernity. 

The workshop was for FLINTA* (Femme, Lesbians, Intersex, Non-binary, Trans, Agender and other*) only, and required experience of using on a non-native language as their main language, due to either colonisation, imperial oppression, or repression of culture.

allapopp (RU/DE) is an interdisciplinary director, performance and media artist, originally from Tatarstan in Russia. allapopp’s work fuses post-Soviet, mixed Tatar, queer & migrant experience with tech-inclusive envisioning performance and activist digital art.

Dinara Rasuleva (RU/DE) is a poet_ess based in Berlin from Kazan, Tatarstan. Their work, often described as decolonial and feminist, spans expressionist and performance poetry.

Part of Re-Imagine Europe: New Perspectives for Action. Co-funded by the European Union.

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