stories from futures past is an interactive performance in which two participants, together with discarded electrical devices, are invited to retell lost futures from forgotten pasts. In an installation-based performance space with an artificial window, atmospheric lighting, and softly crackling and seemingly whispering electrical devices, a perfomer invites the two guests to a round table with present witnesses from different pasts:
Our cast consists of cassette recorders, slide projectors and tube screens, tape recorders, a violet-ray machine, analog cameras and slide films – all of which had at least one life before they came to us through different ways. stories from futures past plays with the lasting traces of these past lives, with the image disturbances and the forgotten ghosts inside the white noise.
Guided by the performer and interactively building on the personal associations and experiences of the spectators, new narratives and sci-fi adventures about contingent futures are created. All these stories and speculations are documented for future visitors, who can listen to them in a cassette archive at the beginning and at the end of each performance.
stories from futures past playfully engages with the idea of impossible and possible futures through a hautological perspective. Through objects, associations and narrative impulses, the paranormal φeer group not only gives a diverse audience (10-100 years old, in English, German, and plain language) the opportunity to tell stories together, but above all to artistically explore the questions: What futures – starting from our timeless present in crisis – can we and do we want to imagine at all? What are we collectively afraid of? And what gives us courage in thinking about a different future?