Everything you find in this Grimoire sprouts from the research project The Futurology of Cooperation.

Several years ago, while reading some novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, we discovered a version of science-fiction that was liberated from the spaceships, aliens and laser guns that we thought were intrinsic to it. The genre revealed itself as a place where alternatives could be developed, other ways of being together examined and different societies imagined.

Le Guin once said: "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings."

That simple thought felt so much more empowering than the killer argument that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

In his book ‘Capitalist Realism’ Mark Fisher points out a crisis of imagination. According to him, since the eighties our imagination has been compressed and limited by the way capitalism operates on our psyche. The sixties and seventies created a social and cultural mindset that attributed a certain level of plasticity to reality, and fuelled the active search for new ways of life and new rules for society. But this plasticity was frozen by austerity policies, and our minds and hopes locked in by the eternal mantra that 'there is no alternative'. The space for imagination deflated, and reality went from something adaptable to something we have to adapt to.

And so we decided to organise a training camp for our imagination.

Born from a desire to sharpen our appetite for alternate possibilities and our competence to imagine them, we wanted this training camp to equip ourselves with concrete and existing tools, to invent new ones, and to share them with others. We wanted to train the muscle of speculative imagination, and to rediscover the plasticity of reality. Unburdened by excessive modesty, we simply wanted to learn how to imagine new societies.

We wanted to do so

• with the idea of learning techniques to visit other worlds and futures, but also to transform our relationships and cooperate in new ways
• by being in a logic of sharing, exchange and co-learning
• by experimenting with our bodies and emotions
• by rejecting the separations between the rational, the imaginary, the unconscious, the serious and the absurd

We feel a strong desire

• to leave the ankylosing work patterns and narratives in this time of transition and collective challenges
• to improve our working and development conditions with new tools and share them with as many people as possible
• to make futurology and foresight more democratic and ergonomic through artistic action
• to experiment with a form of artistic intervention that is concerned with reality, between collective performance and curating of mutant formations

We put together a team and the research trajectory ‘The Futurology of Cooperation’ was born. Early 2019, we invited Maja Kuzmanovic and Rasa Alksnyte from FoAM to kick off the trajectory. They introduced us to the Art of Futuring and to some of the basic tools and techniques of ‘future-crafting’. We also invited Emmanuelle Wattier and Martin Boutry, facilitators in collective intelligence, who shared some of the tricks of their trade.

We warmly recommend reading 'The Art of Futuring', the beautifull lecture that Maja presented in February 2019 to kick off the research project.

We have learned and collected a lot. In a world that has become at times hostile, alienating and incapacitating, we learned where to regain strength, to slide towards other possible paths. From head to toe. Alone or with others. We laughed a lot. We tested our favourite futures. We mixed, remixed and hacked existing techniques from Futures Studies and Collective Intelligence, blended them with magic, creative writing, artistic-critical intuitions...

These tricks and spells are to be experienced, to be tinkered with as they say. They are recipes for transformation, for becoming other.

The Grimoire is here to... "share an experience, wish it on others. Multiply rather than replicate. To encourage an active and regenerative contamination; to coalesce from a poetic, political proposal." - Delphine Gardey on Donna Haraway