Weaving Memory, Harvesting the Future: Knowledge That Doesn’t Fit in the Cloud

The office of the Biosphere Reserve of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, as part of the Let’s Talk About the Biosphere program, has scheduled the conference “Weaving Memory, Harvesting the Future: Knowledge That Doesn’t Fit in the Cloud.” The talk will take place on June 4, 2026, at 7:00 PM, in the Aula Magna of UNED Lanzarote.

Summary

We live trapped in a narrative: the future will be dystopian, hyper-technological, or it will not be at all. They have stolen our ability to imagine worlds that are not extensions of the present: more surveillance, more data, more urgency. But on the margins—in Indigenous communities, in repair workshops, in urban gardens, in biosphere reserves—other technologies are already flourishing. They are not artifacts of the future: they are knowledge of the present, often ancient, always situated.

This conference proposes a journey: from the pollution and extractivism of coltan mines to the e-waste dumps of the Global South; from algorithms that calculate acceptable deaths to the care networks that sustain life; from GPS that atrophies our memory to the radio that saved us during a blackout. But also a journey back: to embodied memory, to ancestral intelligences, to degitalization as a political horizon.

A conversation about islands, time, memory, other possible technologies, and radical tenderness. For those who still believe that another world is not only possible, but was always here, because the future is ancestral.