A New Futurist Manifesto
by Stefan Hurtig
1. We want to sing the love of the future, the intimacy with energy and boldness.
2. Courage, daring and revolt will be the elements of our future.
3. We want to praise the disarming standstill, the daydream, the rest, the idleness, the savoir-vivre and the tenderness.
4. We declare that the world’s wonder has been enriched by a fresh beauty: the beauty of deceleration. An SUV with its trunk adorned by great exhaust pipes like snakes with an explosive breath… roaring cars that form an endless stream of traffic are swallowed by the white swan.
5. We want to defeat the man who holds the steering wheel. The earth tumbles gently.
6. Humanity withdraws, glowing, glamorous and generous, in order to leave the elements to themselves.
7. There is no more beauty except in reconciliation. A work with an aggressive character cannot be a masterpiece. Art must be interpreted as a praise of unknown forces, so that humanity may bow down before them.
8. We are standing on the outermost ice floe of the centuries. We must look back if we are to break open the mysterious gates of the impossible! Time and space are eternal. We already live in the absolute, for we have overcome the eternal, ubiquitous acceleration.
9. We want to despise growth – the aberrations of industrialization –, patriotism, racism. A disarming feminism thrives in us all.
10. We want to destroy monopolies and fight against all cowardice based on convenience and self-interest.
11. We shall sing of the great crowds that pay homage to leisure, pleasure, or strolling; the multicolored, many-voiced flood of revolutions on every Friday. We sing of the liberation from concrete runways, from turning assistants, from seat reservations, from individually packaged miniature croissants and from contrails in the blue sky.
Based on the Manifesto of Futurism by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1909
HD Video, 6:10 min, soundchairs, wood, nylon
In times of daily apocalyptic news due to the pandemic, the film speculates on a post-COVID19 future. Alternative economic concepts such as degrowth suddenly no longer appear so utopian. Video footage shot at VW Wolfsburg is combined with a voiceover about deceleration and idleness. The spoken words are based on the Futurist Manifesto by Italian arstist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti from 1909. A century after its publication, I revised the eleven paragraphs, creating a New Futurist Manifesto that inverts Marinetti’s praise of machinery, acceleration, and industrialization.
Music Score by DURA
Voice by Elizabeth Gerdeman
Sound Mix by Sebastian Geist
Kind support of the Culture Foundation of the Free State of Saxony (KdFS)
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