Inspired by Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope, Giuseppe Porcaro and Emmi Itäranta imagine a utopian future for Europe. How things would look like if the European Union would discover a new source of clean and limitless energy?
*Europarama is a podcast series about science fiction and the future of Europe brought to you by the Are We Europe podcasting family. *
In “The Principle of Hope” Ernst Bloch lays out the many ways in which hope and the human desire for liberation and fulfillment appear in our everyday lives.
Amidst Europe’s post-war reconstruction, in 1954, Bloch restored honour to the idea of utopia by seeing it not as a pre-existing programmatic state which had to be reached under wise and all-knowing leadership either of the party or the church, but as a process driven by human beings, driven on by their material hunger as well as their dreams of overcoming that hunger.
In a nutshell, Bloch says that what drives us on are our daydreams of a better and brighter world.
Inspired by these, Giuseppe Porcaro and Emmi Itäranta imagine possible utopian elements in a future version of our continent.
**How such a utopian version of Europe will look like? **
Emmi Itäranta grew up in Finland and now resides in Canterbury, UK. She writes fiction in Finnish and English. Her debut novel Memory of Water has won numerous awards, including a James Tiptree Jr. Award honors list mention and the Kalevi Jäntti Prize for young writers in Finland. Emmi's work has been translated to more than 20 languages. Coming from an eclectic writing background, her former life includes stints as a columnist, theatre critic, dramaturge, scriptwriter and press officer.
Giuseppe Porcaro is the author of DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms, among the winners of the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outrech of the European Union in 2018. Giuseppe is interested in how the intersection between technology and politics is moving towards uncharted territories in the future. He also focuses on narrative-building and political representations in the European Union. He works as the head of communications for Bruegel.