PRACTICAL VISION | Words for the Future

Jalada is a Pan-African collective of young writers, translators and publishers connected online while living in different parts of the African continent. In 2016 they started the Translation Project; translating one short story in as many indigenous African languages as possible. Moses Kilolo, a member of this collective, writes about the quest for a return of a diversity of African languages; ‘the future is multilingual’. The Future’s vision on publishing is to safeguard and share knowledges that would otherwise get lost – seeing the digital realm failing at that job. In their artistic gesture in response to Practical Vision, they imagine a post-internet age by 2051, presenting the loss of (digital) memory through a series of geometrics shapes that ‘seem’ to fit together…

Words for the Future is a many-voiced series of ten words that point to the possible imaginations of various futures. Ten people from diverse fields of knowledge were asked to propose a word for the future through an essay, while an artist in whose work this particular world seemed to already be latently present, was invited to respond to it. Bringing both perspectives together in one publications, each issue becomes a dialogue around one world.

PRACTICAL VISION is issue #3 in the series Words for the Future, curated and edited by dramaturg Nienke Scholts. (The full series (limited edition) is available through San Serriffe aswell.)