With this makeshift, impromptu composition of artworks and discourse, we share with our Utrecht publics a series of spontaneously assembled impressions—notes as it were—from a major manifestation of BAK’s flagship project FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects, realized earlier in 2013 in collaboration with Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Neither an exhibition nor a conference, it entails no order, but rhythms and accidents; no certainty, but a set of propositions; no script, but an invitation to imagine a “what if” scenario—and, with it, the world otherwise…

FORMER WEST (2008–2016) is a long-term research, education, exhibition, and publication project aimed at a critical reinterpretation of post-1989, post-Cold War histories around an imaginary of “formerness,” countering the persistent hegemonies of the so-called West within a global context. In an attempt to alter the narrative of our own time, and reclaim from there the future as a field of possibility, FORMER WEST enables a continuous flow of manifold conversations among artists, theorists, students, activists, and other varied publics.