“[…] What if we tried to tell another history instead? The history of non-killers, non-colonizers, non-masters, non-heroes… In the 1970s, the American anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher spread a curious evolutionary theory called “Carrier Bag Theory”. According to Fisher, the cultural device used by the first humans on Earth was not, as the contemporary theories claimed, a hunting tool – a spear or a stick – but rather a container, a tool designed to collect food and transport it home, a tool for care. A decade later, Ursula Le Guin would take up Fisher’s “Carrier Bag Theory” and incorporate it into her theory of the novel and fiction. In her essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, published in 1988, she will apply the metaphor of the container that needs to be filled (with words, concepts, images) to the science fiction novel. In this way literature finally begins to tell the anti-heroic history of human beings. As a matter of fact, accepting the idea that human history is full of objects used for hitting, wounding and killing means accepting only one of the many histories that can be told. And today more than ever, contemporary arts, which embrace horizontally different media by dialoguing with multiple disciplines, may be able to imagine alternatives and counter-narratives not only of our most distant past, but above all
of our imminent and uncertain future over which hovers the specter of the Anthropocene.”

Text by Dario Ali

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