What if nuclear bomb had not been invented? What if the West had not win the Cold War, would the world be less benign or perhaps less malign? What if the Bandung Conference became a successful movement in gathering the Third World solidarity? What if there was a strong coalition of non-aligned governments in Asia and Africa? What if Southeast Asia had a different grouping that overcame Asia and bypassed the Pacific? What if the Berlin Wall never fell? What if the Berlin Wall had never been built? What if the leftist movement in Asia was able to gain bigger power? How close did we come to alternative worlds the Bandung Conference imagine?

From Bandung to Berlin is an open and shared immaterial platform of collaboration that revolves around the interplay of historical locations and times between the first Afro-Asian conference in Bandung in 1955 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The project begins from Bandung Conference because the meeting is considered as the birthplace of the so-called Third World and the non-aligned movement amidst the ideological battle between the Western and Eastern blocs. Meanwhile, the fall of the Berlin Wall is chosen to represent the symbolic coda to Cold War epoch that resulted with the collapse of communism and the triumph of capitalism, at least within the prevailing Euro-American horizon. The past is revisited in order to inspect the fragility of ideologies that emerged from Bandung 1955

and Berlin 1989: the so-called neutral ideology in
the former, and the so-called democratic capitalism in the latter.
By creating imaginative and indirect interconnections between these events, the collaborative project serves as a shared immaterial platform to invent new passages in history. In this project, the spatiotemporal distance from Bandung to Berlin is retraced with transnational approach through creating various speculative routes and networks that involve the fictionalization of history as its modus operandi. Deploying fiction as a necessary narrative mode, the project circulates within a precarious field of literature as a means to provoke a productive ambiguity that confronts the general ambiguous interplay of subjectivities between fictional and historical writings.





When the death of futures was pronounced by Fukuyama in 1989, those who followed his train of thoughts said, “There is no alternative.” When History was murdered, future has become a thing of the past. No future was the new future.

We are made to live in a futureless present where we are perpetually going nowhere, faster and faster. They only want us to think about the here and the now, to stay in our precarious bubble.

But the other futures are always already inscribed within the present. They are neither futures with a sense of progress nor a limitless growth. It is something else. A spectral future, a dizzying horizon of possibilities that still haunts us. It comes into being when someone tried to remember the future. It comes into being when someone murmured, “What if ?”