For many of us 2019 has been a shitty, disappointing and often depressing year. Too many lows to list here from around the world. In my country the east coast is on fire, a climate-change fueled unnatural disaster that the reprehensible state and federal politicians are blatantly pretending isn’t happening. Yes, I’m aware too of disasters and political repression effecting friends and comrades in Chile, Iran and Hong Kong. We’re living through worsening depredations on our environment and the decimation of living diversity across the globe while the psychopaths in charge of the corporations and their functionaries in government urge us to acquiesce to the plunder at all costs approach.
Sometimes the rusted on despair seems too much and I wonder how we artists, poets, dreamers can inspire and provoke a wilder freer future and challenge the shitty one being foisted on us.
I was inspired by the game of surrealist predictions on the Surrealist Revolution FB page to ask whether other folk are interested to extend that idea to create a surrealist almanac for 2020 – a future calendar – around the theme of ‘what should be’. This would take the form of a collection of poetic images, imagined events in written, visual, audio and whatever other forms participants choose to imagineer the most radically poetic future we can.
So choose a date… a week, month or minute for 2020 and elaborate what aught to be on that day. Anyone up for it?
As the year is already underway I see no problem backdating any entries so we can still include January/February. A deadline: End of February, early March.
Contributions can take any form and relate to specific time periods and days/nights for the forthcoming year. Images, found art, illustrations, a title and explanation of the feast/anniversary/unnatural disaster/ unsabbath or revived tradition/s welcome. Questions, suggestions, criticism, abuse can be emailed to me.
Contributions can be emailed to: Surrealisalmanach2020@yahoo.com
– Tim White