The Future Lasts Forever
A Conversation between Runo Lagomarsino and Carlos Motta,
November 2011

Carlos Motta: In November 2010 I saw a graffiti that read “The Future Lasts Forever” on the outside walls of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens; it had been spray painted the day after the opening of their 10th Anniversary exhibition, "The Politics of Art." You and I had been thinking about how to name this publication, and this sentence resonated with me. After discussing it we decided to use it as the title of our project. Would you please respond to the idea that “The Future Lasts Forever” now, after we have requested Latin American artists and theorists to contribute hypotheses and ideas about the future of Latin America for this publication?

Runo Lagomarsino: I like the expression “The Future Lasts Forever” because it is open-ended. It signals the impossibility, the ambiguity, and the multiple ways of approaching such a vast subject as the “future” of Latin America. We had been looking for a phrase that would embody this kind of paradox: There are as many Latin America(s), or representations of Latin America, as there are representations and ideas of the future. Our analyses are destined to fail: Making hypotheses about the future of Latin America is impossible. That impossibility is for me a central aspect of this project.
“The Future Lasts Forever” means that we will never win the lottery, or as Roberto Jacoby elegantly states in his interview in this publication: “If you find yourself in March 2004, when President Kirchner issued the order to unhang the portraits (of generals Videla and Bignone, the dictators, which hung on the walls of military institutions), at that moment present, past and future coalesced; that precise moment contained the three instances of historical time.” Let me explain this in another way: I heard the story of a man who, during a march in Bolivia in support of the new constitution, carried a U.S. flag in his shoe the whole time. He was individually protesting within the collective protest. There was struggle in his shoe. For me the “future” lies there: Between the shoe and the foot. Or Chou En Lai, the Chinese Prime Minister, was in Geneva in 1953 for the peace negotiations to end the Korean War, and a French journalist asked him what he thought about the French Revolution. Chou replied: "It is still too early to tell."

Carlos Motta: I love the idea that the future lies between the shoe and the foot because it suggests that we are responsible for its construction. The future is in every step we take! The future will be only a product of the present and a reflection of the past. I am also interested in the impossibility of imagining the future, especially the future of Latin America, such a vast region that is defined by social and economic inequality and histories of oppression. But what makes imagining the future impossible are the different conceptual frameworks that we have culturally devised, such as science fiction, utopias, dystopias, etc., to do so. When we first started to think about the task of inviting our contributors to think about the future, we thought that we wanted to remain at the margins of those systems of thought. How can one think of a future beyond an idea of what the future is supposed to be? And more importantly, why would one want to do that?
Personally, I deeply disbelieve historical narrative(s) about Latin America. Those hegemonic views, namely, the narrative around the Conquest, Colonialism, Oppression, U.S. Intervention, etc., need to be challenged. Not to deny that these events took place, of course, but to actually name them for what they truly were. Perhaps the future is a site/time of revision and of assuming responsibility for our mindless historical irresponsibility. 

Runo Lagomarsino: The historical narrative(s) that you mention are in fact challenged every day. From the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (that have not only challenged the status quo in Argentina consistently for thirty years, but have also redefined strategies of resistance for social movements throughout the region) to the impressive political shift, “the left turn,” that has occurred during the last ten years in Latin America and has very consciously changed the identity of several countries, you can find examples that battle against the forces of hegemonic power. How a place is named and articulated and who does it, is crucial, but I think avoiding the traps of nationalism and protectionism is equally important. There must be strategies of resistance in place to construct an inclusive “we”; not only to build a discourse about the future, but to actually change the present.