Back to All Events

Crawling Toward Utopia: Retreat to a Larval Future

  • UC Berkeley Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall Berkeley, CA (map)

Larval Rock Stars will be presenting a ‘borderland performance/dialogue’ as part of UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities Research Seminar: Rethinking Futures.


 

In this borderland performance/dialogue, the distributed intelligence of Praba Pilar and Anuj Vaidya (Pilarvaidya, the twins who hold the larva of the post-human between them) ask: Where is the future? Through artistic practice, scholarly excavations, and larval experiments, they have glimpsed the future as the omnidimensional 'Question Mark' that spans space and time.

In this program, they share stories of the queer kinship that spills across their pluriversal lives, show excerpts from their collaborations with a range of intelligences – from the artificial to the microbial and the mycelial, and theorize utopia as an everyday practice of crawling from necrotic egocentrism toward biotic ecocentrism.


The Rethinking Futures (Fall 2024) seminar enables a group of faculty members and graduate students to collaboratively explore "the future" cross-culturally and across time, especially in light of the many existential threats now facing humanity — including environmental crisis, war, and democracy's sudden fragility.

Registration for event here.