Elizabeth A. Povinelli discussion and film at FÓRUM DO FUTURO, Porto

We are constantly hearing that humans face an epochal moment – that, if we’re not at the end, we’re inching close. And it’s not just one sort of ending. For many people, human beings and their earth seem to be close tomany modes of ending. We are hearing conversations about the end of the EU, the end of migrants’ rights and of liberal democracy, the end of gender, sexual, and racial justice; the end of humanity; the end of the planet. So what’s next?

Anthropologist and film director, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, one of the foremost thinkers in contemporary anthropology and gender studies, in a conversation moderated by Guilherme Blanc – director for Contemporary Art and Cinema of Ágora, E.M. and one of the curators for this year’s edition of Fórum do Futuro – will discuss how all the dreams that the West has invented for itself seem to have reached a catastrophic epilogue. What politics and affections would emerge, if, instead of a western analysis of finitude (a philosophy of the end), we developed a social theory with those who have been living after the end? In this lecture, Povinelli will situate one of these social theories in the Australian indigenous worlds, using the film The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland by the Karrabing Film Collective, an indigenous film and video collective based in Australia’s Northern Territory, which she co-founded and which uses film and installation as a form of popular resistance and self-organisation.