ACHRONIES, UCHRONIES AND FRACTAL NARRATIVES

Dora García will introduce Uchronie as a common speculative fiction strategy, an exercise in political imagination envisioning alternate timelines or “what if” scenarios (e.g. What if Germany had won WWII?). She will discuss how Uchronie offers a framework for rethinking social, historical, and political narratives.

She will then explore Achronie, a term coined by German sociologist Elisabeth Lenk as a counterpart to utopia. Achronie represents not an absence of time but its excess, epochs collapsing into one another like the folding legs of a tripod or nested Russian dolls. Dora García will reflect on how this idea suggests a different model for the future: not an ideal place elsewhere, but a simultaneity of pasts and futures converging in the present.

The third concept, Fractal Narrative, will be addressed as a form of storytelling inspired by fractal geometry, endlessly iterative, paradoxically finite and infinite. Dora García will explain how this structure can be applied to language, history (such as the recurring resurgence of fascism), and literature, with Finnegans Wake by James Joyce as a prime example.

To ground these concepts in practice, Dora García will guide participants through a series of exercises for the SIC participants. First, recreating the scenario of The Joycean Society, participants will read and attempt to decipher a few paragraphs of Finnegans Wake.

As a second exercise, using the novel as a warm-up, García will invite participants to imagine specific historical moments where intervention might have altered the course of history. Together, they will build a collective timeline of these crucial times and places, associating images with each, in a speculative exercise of political and historical imagination.

Ticket holders are welcome to attend this masterclass as observers.