Cruel Optimism

Curated by Claudia Mattos

We live during an age in which crisis and calamity have become familiar conditions of the everyday. On a global scale, the already tenuous health of our social, political, economic, and environmental systems is threatened by the interrelated effects of widespread pandemic, soaring inequality, un- or underregulated industry, climate change, and political violence. Against the backdrop of accelerationist capitalism, the pace of progress is slow and the state of our future is unstable and uncertain. 

"Cruel Optimism" is a screening program that reflects on this uneasy reality. It brings together a series of moving image works—by the Alliance of the Southern Triangle, Patricia Domínguez Claro and Nicole L’Huillier, VLM (Virginia L. Montgomery), Zeesy Powers, and Tabita Rezaire—that meditate on the slow pace of change and proffer varying strategies to destabilize (and endure through) the destructive forces that define the present. These strategies include technological activisms, ancestral spiritualities, and speculative protocols, each employed in distinct capacities as tools to more fluidly navigate the precarious landscapes of this moment. Adapted to the techno-capitalist structures that prevail during our time, the featured works alternate between fast-paced digital aesthetics and slower, more meditative, almost hypnotic narrative methods; this push-and-pull works to unsettle the viewer, mirroring the turbulence of our global state of affairs and bringing them crashing into focus. 

Central to the context of "Cruel Optimism" are themes of enmeshment between capitalism and the technological and our co-dependence with their joint infrastructures. The works touch upon the promises and failures of techno-utopianism; the realities that might confront us in a hyper-capitalist future; and the utility of the internet, social media, and smart devices to frame our understanding of the world in mediated unity. Positioning the artist in the critical roles of both teacher and agitator, each video addresses these urgent topics beyond the staid modes of conventional media and education. 

The screening borrows its title from a book by Lauren Berlant, whose writing meditates on our attachments to ideas of what it means to live a good life during times of endemic crisis. Berlant approaches our hopes for the future as fantasies that soothe the uncomfortable realizations that the present—“crumbling at a threatening pace”—can no longer sustain the infrastructures for attaining a good life. Our optimism becomes cruel when we are too attached to our hopes for these failing systems to see that they are hurting us; and the resulting effect is a paradox of self-preservation/self-endangerment measured against the risks of losing what we now have as we work towards a better reality. 

Through their various propositions, the videos in this screening bravely imagine a world unbound from capitalism’s structural impasses; they do the curative work, in Berlant’s terms, of “[distorting] the present”—within their diverse narratives—“on behalf of what the present can become.” In light of shifting terrains, and equipped with the awareness that conditions might veer down ever rockier paths, the works in "Cruel Optimism" are catalyzing agents to help us all envision therapeutic, stabilizing, and hopeful outcomes for the future.

— Claudia Mattos