My advisor, Anna Stetsenko, published a book this year entitled The Transformative Mind: Expanding Vygotsky’s Approach to Development and Education. It illuminates her vision of the world as a place of possibility, conceptualized and made contingent again and again by our contributions to its ever-becoming – mattering – present, which always invokes the future while claiming the fruits of the past. Anna argues a great many things which I will touch on in upcoming posts, but this line encapsulates her philosophy, drawn from her experiences during the Cold War in the Soviet Union and during/after the fall of the Berlin Wall:

The lesson I was able (and lucky) to learn is that the future is actually always in the making now, in the present, and that big changes and shifts might be around the corner even as the present status quo still appears to be immutable and stable. (p. 18)

I love this idea, as it speaks to our ability to act as agents in our worlds, to embrace a view of collective social existence as one that only pretends to be static and given, which flows and changes constantly and awaits, even requires in its rhythms, the participation of all of us in its making.

Such a simple, yet monumental idea appeared in an artistic form in several pieces by Nancy Pantirer (check out her website here), who displayed several installations of her work at the Tribeca Open Artists Studio Tour this spring. She placed 8-10 paintings in a large loft space and set up a lighting display which over the course of a minute or so changed from light to dark, revealing the brilliant shift of different shapes from a recessed place to primary importance. Some of the images appeared humanlike, cloaked figures standing together, and others seemed like celestial bodies, flowing through otherworldly landscapes and spaces. I filmed (with the permission of the artist) several of these interactions of light and paint, feeling the amazing rush of knowing and coming to see images that were always there in the paint.

What a way to see our monolithic understandings of self, our assumptions about the day-to-day. Is it a miracle to come to understand what has always been the case: that the future is actually being made, in our hands, existing already and waiting for us to see it?