Speculation is a “friend with a difference, for it lends to the world of the concrete, the material, the sensory and the ordinary, the element of its capacity to be other than what it is in the present.” Arjun Appadurai (2014:207)[1]

 

Can we escape the present or the past, when even the speculative worlds born from artists' imaginations draw upon them? Conversely, can the speculative gaze, shall we call it, be suppressed when current and historical conditions begin to weigh on a society? As Walidah Imarisha (2015)[2]points out: “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction.”

The relationship between the speculative gaze and history speaks of the double- sided nature of, or is it the intertwining of truth and fiction with the one seemingly unable to exist without the presence of the other. This echoes the splintered conceptual life of the word speculation, which can be traced to its Latin origins, where there was a distinction between speculum (reflecting glass or mirror) which embodied sight and confronting reality (awareness) and specula (watchtower) referring to insight, a vision beyond the present-day, the known (Rogers, 2021:).[3]

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Futurity within decolonial speculative practices relies on creating 'other-worlding' through knowledge production that draws from the past in the act of (re) imagining a future. Speculative art at its core is concerned with process as the event, and not only creates futures but tells us about where we are as communities, and countries based on the desires we situate in our futures.

Speculation isn't grounded in naivety or toxic positivity, but rather truths informed by our pasts which may make us shudder, gain perspective, or find the light in the historicised darkness.

 

The speculative turn in cultural production has become an empowering tool that upends the given rules of our society, making way for alternate histories and futures. Digital art, which will feature in HEAT 2025, is naturally concerned with building alternative worlds and within this sphere, there is a distinction (Kunzelman, 2022: )[5]between the abstraction of contemporary conditions into a science fictional fabulation (like a mirror) and those metaverses that push beyond the limits of reality in the manner of the watchtower analogy.

For the 2025 iteration of the HEAT Festival, we invite artists and curators to delve into speculation as a mode of production — reflecting on its potential to disrupt, transform, and reimagine the processes and products of artistic practice.

We are interested in artists who explore; what it means to approach artmaking through speculation. How might this lens allow them to claim freedom within their artistic processes, breaking from narratives of the zeitgeist and global art market demands? We’re interested in whether speculative practices can resist the violent commodification of histories, traumas, and narratives. Can speculation be used as a methodology to relocate meaning—from the representational and figurative toward abstraction, from oppressive systems of value maximisation toward emancipatory possibilities?

 

Compiled by curators; Voni Baloyi, Mary Corrigall and Nkgopoleng Moloi.

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End Notes:

[1] Arjun Appadurai, “Speculation, After the Fact,” in Speculation, Now, ed. Vyjayanthi Venutur- upalli Rao, Prem Krishnmurthy, and Carin Ruoni (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)
[2] Imarisha, W. (Ed.). (2015). Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction stories from social justice movements. AK Press.
[3] Rogers, Gayle. Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7312/roge20020.

[4] Butler, Philip. Critical Black Futures: Speculative Theories and Explorations. 1st ed. 2021. Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9.
[5] Kunzelman, Cameron. The World Is Born from Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games. München Wien: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110719451.

[6] https://www.academia.edu/70715106/Speculation_as_a_Mode_of_Production_in_Art_and_Capital