Immanent Futures, Quotidian Spaces: A View from Yiwu

The contemporary ecological condition has understandably precipitated diverse apocalyptic narratives that present a monumentally dismal account of the future. Against the backdrop of these overwhelmingly bleak and dystopic narratives, I ask a foundational question: How and who may speak of the future? My practice-based research in documentary film is an exploration of practice methodologies that respond to this question. In this paper I turn to Yiwu, a relatively small but cosmopolitan trading city in China as a site of “future making” (Montfort, 2017). The paper contends that Yiwu, a space replete with low-cost goods, can offer us a quotidian image of the future and serve as a site from which we can think about the creation of liveable concepts for an entangled future that may already have arrived.