Prefiguration

Prefiguration is a social practice in which various civil organizations and political and social movements not only seek to change the existing institutional system but also live the imagined world of the future in the present. They are not drawing up a distant utopia but weaving into the fabric of everyday life the principles and structures they wish to live by. The desired world is not a goal to be achieved but a reality in the making.

Imagine a garden that you are building for the future—one in which plants that are adaptable to environmental changes and tolerant of extreme weather conditions live and survive. To create a garden, we need to take a piece of nature and transform it according to our own imagination. By enclosing it, we create not only a physical but also a symbolic boundary between nature and our manmade environment. We build a world of our own inside the fence, linked to the outside world by a thousand invisible strands: the communication between microorganisms in the soil and the roots of plants reminds us that the link between garden and nature—between the outside world and the inside world—does not cease with the enclosure. The garden is (like) a playground—a place where an imaginary world and reality meet. Both are a kind of world model, the rules of which can be shaped according to what we think about the world and ourselves in it or how we imagine that world. It is a fantasy space where everything is as real as it is unreal but still a little different. Can we look at the garden as a model of prefigurative organizational functioning that is sensitive to the social and environmental changes around it, where the living world, relying on its internal laws, realizes practices of resilience, cooperation, and solidarity?

Since its foundation in 2014, OFF-Biennale Budapest has attached importance to themes such as freedom, play, community-building, democracy, solidarity, and the independence of creative work. Using prefiguration as an operating strategy, it works to develop a model where it challenges existing social norms, entrenched mechanisms that tend to compromise, and plans for the future, which it does by building from the present despite an uncertain institutional environment. It is searching for practices regarding how to imagine things differently.

The OFF-Playground, built as part of the project WHATIFS AND WHYNOTS: OFF-Playground at documenta fifteen in Kassel in 2022, while creating the conditions for a shared adventure, was also a serious experiment. It experimented in prefigurative politics by believing that, within the fence, a playground of spaces, practices, and thoughts proposed by the artists—an interlocking web of interactions—can be created not by transcending reality but in fact with the intention of creating reality by turning a dream into an experience. By creating an “imaginary” space and doing our thing in it, we offer others the opportunity either to take their place in it or to create new islands, spaces of their own. We can hope that these islands will one day be connected. The rules of the game create common ground, and we hope that like-minded people will join us. OFF “plays” institutionally through various curatorial and artistic projects and visions, through social collaborations. We behave as if we were a large-scale, international art institution with a solid financial and human resource base and a supportive environment. We “perform” and “prefigure” an independent institution whose strongest capital is in this shared vision.

Prefigurative politics, as in the case of the playground and the garden, are used to bridge the gap between “imagination and realization,” which is to try to build an imagined future change in a small, model-like way, here and now. However, this always-on, imagination-alert mode inevitably gets tiring at times, and the engine slows down. The contours of the vision fade, and the imagination is exhausted. To recharge the batteries, it is essential that the individual ideas—the little islands—not only move toward something but also hold together. So that the flowering of the garden is not only noticed and felt by a narrow circle but also by others. So that people peering curiously (or suspiciously) from the outside world enter this world. At the very least, this requires that as many of us as possible imagine a garden and see it as a strategic tableau tailored to the everyday world, which, even if it takes small steps, can set up tangible alternatives to the current system.