Paramancy: Volume 1
// Zine + Fabulated Reading Room co-created with Tsēma Igharas and Mark Simpson, exhibited as part of Speculative Energy Futures: Prototypes for Possible Worlds at FAB Gallery, December 10, 2019 - January 11, 2020, Edmonton, Alberta //
Paramancy: Volume 1 was the first iteration of an ongoing project exploring energy futurity through speculative divination. Blending written and visual collaborations, Paramancy draws from our work within Speculative Energy Futures, an interdisciplinary research project funded by Future Energy Systems at the University of Alberta. Taking inspiration from mantic practices—i.e. cartomancy (divination through cards), arithmancy (numerology), necromancy (communing with the dead)—the project develops its own strange divination strategies by attuning to the potential force of petrocultural predictions.
Within the immersive Paramancy Reading Room, participants engaged with speculative practices such as:
Infernomancy – Divination from overwhelming fire, once all hope is lost.
Plastiglomerancy – Reading fossilized plastic residues in the geologic record of late capitalism.
Turfomancy – Interpreting the lawnscape fever-dreams of suburban longing and control.
By unsettling dominant climate imaginaries, Paramancy experiments with playful, critical, and absurd modes of “telling the future”, opening space to reimagine planetary and energetic possibilities beyond extractive petrocultures.
