The design+posthumanism member Delal Şeker is sending a speculative letter and a visual image from the Mesopotamian countryside to the future in the theme Rhythms issue of The Posthumanist magazine. Written by the multiple levels of consciousness (he-she-we-I) of Houbara, a hybrid being living in Mesopotamia in 3027, the letter offers a semantic map of a turning point. Houbara who is composed of the collective memory of two separate fathers, mothers, and a central Asian bird whose vita ended centuries. And he-she-they (Houbara) is with a hybrid cat Çororo whose great-great grandparents were able to hurl them into this century to escape a word with raging race and energy wars, nuclear leaks and the great western European wildfires. Çororo and Houbara are entities who will determine their own mutation and destiny. The letter eventually turns to a poetic interpretation of what the future may be.
Along with the letter, there are other stories, other encounters that expand our spatiotemporal garden. This poetic journey through the magazine is the excitement of hearing the sounds of mushrooms for the first time, the grasp of a copper instrument that makes its own rhythms resonate with the earth, the syllable that sometimes lasts a room length between 0 and 1, the re-acquaintance with the body of a hero who rediscovers sleep, the rush of hormones to separate day and night. In the journey through the patience of a seed, we encounter the answers that produce new conceptual and practical questions, the future, the one that is not here yet.
The editor of the magazine, Anna Nolda Nagele, lines up the various gates along the path in a timely manner with a magnificent editorial installation. The publication-journal itself turns into a creative, inspiring playground with a mechanism that works very well. And once you are fully involved in the game, the reading experience gives way to a performative, empowering, plural and connective experience.
At the end of the journey through the magazine, our heart’s rhythm changes, and that’s where we dare to think again about other forms of life, mutual care, agency, and opportunity to meet Houbara somewhere in time and place.