Olivia Acciarito

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Olivia Acciarito is an emerging arts worker interested in re-centering the process and the ways in which we use and encounter art in our daily lives. Portals of the Otherworld: Realities Reimagined is a research publication which takes as its impetus the ways in which counterpublics have been arrested by the temporal and spatial logics of the colonial, heteronormative, Anthropocentric hegemony, erased from the realm of future memory creation. Through the lens of futurist thinking, this publication examines specifically how public XR artworks are encouraging a reorganisation of temporalities and counterpublics to recover alternative futures through speculative utopianism in our public spaces.

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Portals of the Otherworld: Realities Reimagined

To understand Portals of the Otherworld, it may first be useful to understand the way in which I arrived at this publication. Art itself can be transformative in its phenomenology, having the potential to change the way we think about ourselves, and our relation to the past, present, and future. Whether a passing interaction, or taking the time to sit and be present with an artwork, allowing its affectations to wash over you as if a tidal wave, the experience of art is one which stays with us – one which, whether it has incited jouissance, ire, or confusion, forces us to return to a place within ourselves to question why we feel a certain way.

Portals of the Otherworld: Realities Reimagined

Colonial futures imagine the demise of that which presents as anathema to its pursuit of linearity and ever-growing progress – it cannot exist without destruction, for nothing can exist in a triangulated matrix in a Western worldview. If we continue to hold this view, only thinking creatively when there has been complete decimation of our socioecological and environmental structures, then I fear it may be too late. At the precipice of total disaster, now more than ever we must question our futures as they are presented to us. We must deconstruct the Western frameworks which consign them as providence.

Portals of the Otherworld: Realities Reimagined

Collapsing the past, present and future through a psychology of disincarnation, the works explored recover the existence of erased publics from within urban space by revising and imploding settler futurity, allowing for multivalence to enter our negotiations of space, time, and the future itself. To think through the ideas of futurism is no longer idealistic, but contingent. The public art encounters explored in Portals of the Otherworld create a paradigm shift, transgressing the boundaries of space, whereby hope becomes generative of radical inclusive futures, capable of freeing us from the clasp of the colonial, capitalistic, Anthropogenic present

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