My grandmother told us children to stop daydreaming. “Fantasy is for the privileged, she said.” My mother shook her head and whispered, “Fantasy is a human right.”
Fantasy offers pathways into unsettling territories of the unknown. Some say it’s synonymous with the fulfilment of wishes, but they are just afraid of the transformative power of imagination. New worlds won’t arrive through discussion or negotiation but can be found next to the well of fantasy. Today, the attention economy, social media, immersive art, autofiction, celebrity culture—even individualism and the commodification of identity—labour toward the cessation of fantasy.
Have we been robbed of fantasy? Is fantasy something contemporary societies aim to suffocate?
After watching cartoons on TV with my daughter, we feel exhausted. The tempo is so high, the flow of information so intense, there’s no space for fantasy. I discover that kids today re-enact films instead of using them to create their own adventures.
In a reality fixed on identity and individuality, it seems we can’t “afford” to fantasise. Fantasy isn’t efficient or economically defensible. Strangely, although we live in a world that is increasingly artificial, it is at the same time obsessed with realism—keeping it real while reducing fantasy to desirable Instagram stories.
Do the performing arts, even art in general, suffer from the same decomposition of fantasy—preoccupied with being relevant, asking the right questions, and fulfilling requirements? Has art lost touch with fantasy, focusing instead on lived experience, marketing the artist’s personal identity, and becoming a sellable brand?
Perhaps it is exactly in times of global crisis that we really need fantasy—that we ought to reclaim the right to fantasise, stave off populism, and rediscover hope.
Fantasy isn’t an expression of the self; it leaks through the construction of personhood. It is an access point to the places where mystery resides. Neither fantasy nor art is obliged to communicate. It is, instead, precisely because of what isn’t transmitted that our imagination starts to spin, carve its own paths, and create worlds. Some say, “Art that doesn’t communicate is nothing.” On the contrary: art is something, and fantasy exists precisely because it doesn’t give the spectator clues, ask questions, or tell us how to calibrate our moral compass.
This year, Ob/scene Festival devotes itself to fantasy and to artists who, through their work, let us forget the world, time, and space, and take off on our own immaterial adventures. Ob/scene presents art that—through different media and formats, as forms of political resistance—unlocks doors for us, as individuals and collectively, to leave reality behind and take imagination for a gentle, wild, perhaps overwhelming ride.
