The Murmur Community — Cultivating social imaginaries toward flourishing peace
We are very proud to announce that our speculative project has been selected by the United Nations as one of five winners of the Futuring Peace Exhibition organized by Design Futures Initiative and the UN’s DPPA!
Our project consists of two pieces where we speculate on how peace will be practiced in the year 2033. Watch and read more below about our project.
Statement
In the 2020s, peacekeeping was transformed into a predictive and preventative endeavor through widespread datafication. In the span of a few years, machine learning flattened the world into a supposed comprehensive codex for future prediction. By 2027, peacebuilding was preached on the contention of conflicts by algorithmically considering all past data points of human interaction. The assumption was that stability and the absence of friction, policed by quantification and automation, would inescapably lead to peace.
However, new dimensions for conflict were instead opened. Predictive peacekeeping transformed citizens into objects onto which conflict suppression machines were deployed. Conflict erasure became future erasure as common histories were reduced to data points. By the 2030s, multilateral peacebuilding institutions could not ignore the deafening murmurs of citizens deprived of past and future imaginaries any longer.
Murmur Community was born as a reaction to decades of solution-based approaches that conceived peace as a homeostatic end state. Instead, Murmur seeks to reimagine peaceful futures as dynamic and reflexive processes. Peacebuilding involves recovering and unfolding a plurality of voices to articulate social tensions, conflicts, limitations, and failures. Murmur Community activates the global citizenry, especially the historically excluded, oppressed, and marginalized, as the primary actors of peacebuilding in an effort to create imaginaries of belonging that reframe and surpass current cultural and national understandings.
Piece 1: Murmur platform
Murmur Platform is envisioned as a democratic global participation and peacemaking network that opens the black box of past, present, and future imaginaries to help us to reconcile, transform, and orient ourselves toward enabling peaceful futures. Murmur is powered by radical inclusion and participation of the global citizenry.
The platform was designed as a participatory infrastructure for imagination — enabling individuals and communities to catch dreams, recall past emotions, embrace irrationalities, generate dissonance, and celebrate complexity. Through the recontextualization and reframing of alienated data into histories, Murmur Platform attempts to promote reflexive processes toward enacting democratized visions of a life of dignity for all.
*Read more in the Temporal Justice Manifesto:
Piece 2: A Poster from Resilience, Resistance, and Memory (curated in the Murmur Platform)
The exhibition traces the evolution of protest wear of the past decade to present day. The peaceful protest wear of today are manifestations of all predecessors. They embody the symbolic violence, genealogy, and cultural appropriations of past groups and protests, expressed through fashion and theatrics to express the anxieties, hopes, dreams and calls for justice across times and geographies.
The mask is the central symbol of solidarity, activism, and self-protection. The mask symbolizes citizenship and activism — to protect others from oneself as a potential viral carrier, and as a data harvesting and broadcasting device for the Murmur community. The mask is also a stark reminder of the vulnerability of systemically racialized protesters to visible and invisible violence; it expresses the failure of 2020s societies to tackle the Coronavirus, the 2025s the arms race to protect faces against algorithmic identification, and today’s need to protect bodies marching physically vs. in proxy from climate effects of extreme heat, cold, and UV light.
*Special thanks to Antonio Calleja-López for his mentorship in this project. ||u|| Collective was founded in 2020 after the Post-Inertia Summer School organized by Escola Massana in Barcelona. Covid-19 incentivized and made possible the global collaboration.
