Jerūiyq

Journey Beyond the Horizon

Fig. 1: Sketch for the Kazakhstan Pavilion 2024, exhibition model by Konstantin Petruk, © Kazakhstan Pavilion 2024 1_Decolonial Futurism as Creative Disruption Fiction Making Future Geographies “Kazakh Wakanda” is Jerūiyq, also known as Zhér-Üyök, a mythical country of universal well-being from ancient Kazakh legends about Asan Kaygy. His name means ‘sad’ or ‘melancholic,’ and he lived in the 14th and 15th centuries, serving as an advisor to the founder of the Kazan Khanate, Ulu-Muhammad, and later to the founder of the Kazakh Khanate, Janibek Khan. Asan Kaygy was also a philosopher, a zhiraу (a folk poet-singer), and a traveler who searched for and glorified Jerūiyq—the promised land where people live without sorrow, penury, or oppression, and where the pastures are so abundant that birds build their nests on the backs of rams. It is believed that this socio-utopian legend reflects a specific historical situation in the mid-15th century, when the decline of the Golden and White Hordes led to the migration of several tribes to Moghulistan under the leadership of the khans Kerey and Janibek, and the founding of the Kazakh Khanate. [1] According to Danagul Tolepbay, these aspirations resonate not only with the current global situation, in which every person is searching for their place, but also with the main project of the 2024 Venice Biennale, Strangers Everywhere, as set by the curator Adriano Pedrosa. [2] Thus, geographical imagination finds itself at the center of the project. It connects the question of identity with decoloniality through spatialization. Like the fiction of Wakanda [3], it consciously strives to go beyond the horizon of existing social systems and corresponding systems of knowledge, engaging utopian imagination and science fiction. However, the elements of fiction are not arbitrary: they are based on deeper and more fundamental components of identity, necessarily including presumably pre-modern non-Western and non-capitalist elements. The effectiveness of decolonial futurisms—from Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, and Ethnofuturism to certain readings of Russian Cosmism and endeavors to establish “comparative futurism” as a research field—is rooted in this combination. [4] Decolonial futurism is an attempt at a creative disruption, a transgression beyond the existing social and imaginary systems. Artistic decolonial futurisms often strengthen the mutual penetration of art and geography. Researchers have already elaborated on the concept of artful or experimental geography, as well as on art as geographical practice. [5] The opposite is also true: “the ‘expanded field’ of geographic knowledge-making now includes creative practitioners,…