For our next Loops session, we explore how literature, narrative, and essayistic practices act as tools for emancipation, critique, and the exploration of crisis. The session brings together two complementary approaches to storytelling as forms of speculation, moving between dystopian absurdity and everyday utopia, collapse and the persistence of collective desire.

Elisa Cuter reflects on how writing can reactivate energies suppressed by dominant cultural forms. She examines how shared memory, play, and affect might counter widespread disaffection, sketching a cultural horizon where transformative change remains possible. Her perspective offers a hopeful vision of reclaiming spaces for imagination, pleasure, and solidarity.

Matteo De Giuli turns to literary worlds marked by post-historical desolation, where voices arise from the ruins of exhausted languages and eroded time. In these disorienting, often absurd landscapes, storytelling becomes a survival gesture that reflects fragmentation while inventing new modes of relation. His reading confronts the narrative fallout of collapse, asking how to narrate life after the end of the world.

Together, they invite us to see how literature and narrative speculation can disrupt, reframe, and reanimate our understanding of crisis. Rather than seeking escape, this session embraces storytelling as a vital space for sensing, thinking, and practicing otherwise.