Abstract
Truth and its nature have long been foundational to the pursuit of artistic expression and understanding. Legendary science fiction author Octavia E. Butler held truth central to her work, “Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.” Prominent poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou believed that “There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.”
As fierce debates about the nature of truth raged on globally, Speaking Truth | Summit X explored radical truth-telling and its implications, manifestations, potentialities, and challenges across disparate yet interconnected fields.
Our relation to truth is complex, intersectional, and urgent. Public intellectuals have argued that the society of the 2010s was one in which it was no longer possible to distinguish between the factual and the imagined, reality, and simulacra. What is the nature of truth as we now see it presented as a subjective rather than objective condition? How has the growing distrust of the media, institutions, and authorities affected our ability to distinguish between the real and the fake? And how have artists responded in turn?
These questions were addressed throughout the Summit by those working within proliferating technology and the dark side of automatization and surveillance, global health through the lens of gender and class inequality, self-determination of those serving invisible economies, Indigenous populations asserting sovereignty in the face of erasure, as well as the media at the nexus of fictions, facts and deceptions. The Summit was aimed to be a mirror reflecting and magnifying the peculiarities of the post-truth condition, as well as a forum of debate that could offer audiences an unparalleled opportunity to better understand the cultural and political situation, while convening to envision the future.
SECTION FOUR: FICTIONS & FUTURES
Recognizing the reactionary political effects that shape our present condition and affect landscapes, psychologies and imaginations, how can we re-imagine various forms of institutional, physical, and mental decolonization through empowering fictions and future utopias of togetherness? Art and culture have the capacity to experiment with strategies of deception and fiction that catalyze change. Speakers in this section address the effects of fiction that are critical in drawing attention to the framing mechanisms of deception, as well as those who invent new universes of possibilities.
Jeremy O. Harris
Victoria Lomasko
lauren woods