Fourth and last book of the collection Altermodernities: A Traveller's Notes
Altermodernities commenced in Book 1 with the thesis presented in the first two poems of the book - “Bookspell” and “Fabrica Mundi” – so in Book 4 we come full circle. Altermodernity’s “Fabrica Mundi” is a pluriworld of workers, travellers, tourists, vagabonds and dreamers, grim and magical at the same time: full of human characters and situations trapped in their bodies, in social expectations, emotions and desires. However, the same characters animate reality and activate alternative futures, here with their rebellious attitudes towards social constrictions, there with their decision to depart from reality, craft an alternative one in their minds or in a different physical place. The ways our sociocultural world (mundus) and its environmental backdrops reveals itself to us is also always-already an act of invention (fabrica). To share the experience of this double and contradictory gesture (revelation presupposes pre-existence, whereas invention presupposes ex nihilo construction), humans converse, write and perform with and for others. Writing and performing are “bookspells” or magical realist acts: they produce realities based of perception, amplification, code-switching, perspectival and adversarial narration and so forth. We are the wizards and witches of our perceived universes with the ability to make things happen – which is why, even in the darkest hour, we can retrieve hope from the storeroom of disaster.
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