Bruno Verner at Against the Slow Cancellation of the Future - Center For Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University.

Against the Slow Cancellation of the Future - CCS MA conference at the Centre of Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths - University of London.

An anti-disciplinary conference organized by the MA students of the Centre for Cultural Studies (CCS), Goldsmiths, University of London. 

It seems at once obvious and naïve that we look to the future when considering the transformation of society as a project in which we ourselves take part. Though the questioning of the unbridled futurity of modernism is undoubtedly important, we now find ourselves at a point in which forward-looking, transformative or utopian projects are increasingly hard to even imagine.

Our frame of reference is Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s “slow cancellation of the future”, which we in the same breath proclaim our opposition to. Mark Fisher reminds us that its meaning “is not only that sense of termination, but [also] the gradual nature of it”; the future not having been unashamedly ripped from our grasp, but rather stolen away silently, piece by piece.

We are not so presumptuous as to declare the slow cancellation of the future a completed process. Indeed it is perhaps in the very moment at which we accept the definitive conclusion of this project – thus admitting it ourselves – that the future truly ceases to exist. And this is precisely why we meet: to discuss what we might do as activists, thinkers, groups and initiatives, against the slow cancellation of the future.

Bruno Verner // No Nights: Post Punk, Death Sambas and Other Transitions in Brazil

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, describes the year 1977 in ‘After the Future’ as a turning point in the history of culture, technology and philosophical thought with the abandonment of the illusions in relation to the ‘utopias of future’ and the arrival of a decade of intense modernization, privatization and functional spirit set by the neoliberal counter-revolution. This new world order signalized the inauguration of an exorbitant capitalist realist pervasive atmosphere on an international scale, altering processes of subjectivity around the world and affecting the forces of desire, creation and action.

Brazil did not escape these forces. However, it still trusted its “future” more than anything. In 1985, the country was emerging from a twenty-one-year repressive military dictatorship which curtailed the freedoms of its citizens and forced political & cultural actors into exile, radically transforming its public space. From the south perspective, therefore, the ‘end of history’ and consequently the ‘end of the future’ was never at hand. There was both trust and distrust and a constant interplay between these two narratives.

My paper is concerned with the investigation of sonic-politico and aesthetic overlooked manifestations of singularity in Brazilian post-punk. It explores how ‘underground’ post-punk practice and ethics were instrumental in forging an experimentalist and yet popular independent and interdisciplinary DIY culture by examining a constellation of voices, inflections, collective activisms and forms of musicality as it investigates distinct processes of subjectivation in the construction of a tropical, poetic and political black-latino-caboclo semiotics.

These modes of inventing and/or experiencing ‘new futures’ as horizons of expectation, hope or destruction - in utopian or dystopian versions - played a crucial role in the process of shaping a Brazilian cannibalistic post-tropicalist existential dilemma; one that became a recurrent theme [and an affect] which haunts Brazil’s collective social, musical, political and aesthetic imaginary to this day.


SHORT BIO

Bruno Verner is a composer, artist and writer, member of Brazilian duo Tetine (www.tetine.net). He has produced a number of albums including "Slum Dunk Presents Funk Carioca” (Mr Bongo 2004), "The Sexual Life of The Savages - Underground Post Punk from São Paulo" (Soul Jazz Records 2005), as well as "Let Your X’s be Y’s" (Soul Jazz Records 2008), From A Forest Near You (Slum Dunk 2010), "In Loveland With You" (Slum Dunk 2013) and "Tetine vs Sophie Calle" (Sulphur Records) amongst others. He has performed extensively in Europe and South American and has produced performance pieces, videos and installations with his partner Eliete Mejorado, also from Tetine.

Verner has been instrumental in bringing the Brazilian underground music scene to the attention of the UK through his radio show Slum Dunk on Resonance Fm 104.4 since the station’s inception. He has recently He has recently contributed with a chapter "40 Degrees in Black" for the book ‘Post Punk Then and Now’ edited by Mark Fisher, Gavin Butt and Kodwo Eshun, released by Repeater Books and is currently a PhD researcher in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University.

                               Black Future, ‘Eu Sou o Rio’, 1988