Gathered by this shared awareness, on Saturday, January 31, 2026, a temporary community took shape, choosing as its founding act the sharing of food during a collective lunch. What better occasion to think of the future as a present practice, bringing together pleasure, experiences, and desires. Spazio Baôm became a field of subtle forces, where imagination, language, technology, and political project were treated as materials to be handled together. The voices that intertwined—Daniela Calisi, Kenobit, Francesco Verso, Simone Savogin, Xenodibi, to name just a few—gave form to a choral discourse that holds together solarpunk and gratuitism, care and infrastructure, poetry and action.
In this suspended time, technology was discussed as something to inhabit, language as an environment to cultivate, and gratuitousness as a real structure of common life. Desire emerged as a projective force, care as a method, and imagination as shared ground on which to once again exercise collective responsibility.
This article gathers and reorganizes those moments. It is a trace born from that encounter but continuing elsewhere: in open conversations, shared practices, laboratories, celebrations, and collective rituals. A way of saying, together, that there are many possible futures, and that when they begin is up to us—by starting immediately to give them form.
The Salotto di Miranda enters the narrative as a living experience. It is an urban greenhouse, a glass house, a fragile and permeable space that finds meaning only through use. It functions as a concrete reference point for discussing gratuitousness, care, and the collective use of spaces, as an example of a possible way of inhabiting the city.
When Daniela Calisi speaks, her contribution builds this imaginary without resorting to abstract definitions. She speaks of a transparent place, crossed by light, that remains open and available. The Salotto, she says, is a form that makes sense only when it is inhabited: it exists in the moment someone decides to enter, stop, and use it without having to justify their presence. It is not an event container, but an empty space in waiting and listening for those who wish to inhabit it.
Over four years, this practice has transformed a previously abandoned area through daily presence. Different activities coexist without hierarchies—from play to silence, from reading to music—because nothing is prescribed. Gratuitousness, in Daniela’s account, emerges as a concrete and demanding practice: a choice that keeps open the tension between the desire to make projects exist and the will not to reduce them to performance. The Salotto remains inhabitable precisely because it refuses to become efficient and productive.
Only after this account does Daniela openly name the term solarpunk. For years, she explains, Miranda avoided using it: too easy to mistake it for an aesthetic, too poorly understood in the local context. The shift occurs through dialogue with Francesco Verso, who invites them to reclaim solarpunk as a true school of thought, including a political one. Solarpunk originates in the Global South, in Brazil, and radically rethinks the relationship between future, technology, and nature. It does not refer to an abstract tomorrow but to the daily construction of an ideal present, imagined in its most attractive details, spreading like fungal hyphae through the substrate: interstitially, in every available space, branching, extending, and bringing nourishment and life.
Here one of the central themes of the meeting emerges: the refusal of waiting. Not waiting for perfect conditions, funding, or permissions. “We want everything and we want it now” becomes a discipline of desire. We reclaim the freedom to say how we would like the world to be without having to prove its feasibility. Desire comes before the plan and is immediately followed by early attempts, experiments, and hypotheses of systematization.
When Francesco Verso takes the floor, the discourse widens. His intervention immediately assumes a protective stance. Verso speaks of solarpunk as a contested field, a living word at risk of being emptied if separated from the practices that generated it. As he retraces the trajectory of cyberpunk—born as a critical lens to explore tensions between technological innovation, social control, and personal power, and soon transformed into mere spectacle—he points to a concrete risk: neutralizing conflict by erasing its problematic value and leaving only the image intact. In his account, solarpunk remains tied to a precise genealogy, born from below, openly questioning the Western, centralized, capitalist model of the future. Solarpunk is a wide blanket, contested by different interpretations. There is no single definition, but there is the risk of it being hollowed out, as happened to cyberpunk, transformed from political warning into spectacular aesthetic. Solarpunk emerged as a grassroots movement contesting a Western, white, capitalist, centralized future, and today it asks to be defended from top-down appropriations.
Verso distinguishes two major trajectories. On one side, solarpunk in the Global North, intertwined with ecological, social, and urban movements. On the other, solarpunk born in the Global South, where the issue is avoiding destructive development paths. Here solarpunk becomes a strategy of evolutionary leapfrogging: jumping directly to new infrastructure models, bypassing centralized systems to appropriate technologies in pragmatic, immediate, distributed, local, and accessible ways.
He introduces two terms that, for him, embody the solarpunk spirit. The first is jugaad, an Indian word indicating the ability to solve problems using locally available resources, with creativity and adaptation. The second is shanzhai, a Chinese term originally associated with copying and counterfeiting, but which in fact describes a practice of opening technologies: disassembling them, copying them, improving them, making them accessible—a process that has allowed entire communities to appropriate otherwise inaccessible tools.
From this comes his key assertion: if you cannot open a technology to look inside it and repair it, that technology is not yours. Repair thus becomes a political and caring practice.
This theme intertwines with Kenobit’s contribution, which shifts the focus to imagination and technology as sites of everyday conflict.
Kenobit speaks with declared urgency. His intervention is permeated by the idea that imagination has been progressively neutralized. He recounts how cyberpunk stopped functioning as a warning and became an aesthetic, a dystopia one can consume without reacting. Hence the need, for him, to return to imagining as a political act, as a daily exercise that orients choices and keeps alive the desire for change. Cyberpunk, born as a warning, became an aesthetic of dystopia. We have grown accustomed to recognizing disaster without feeling called to prevent it. For Kenobit, solarpunk serves to reopen this possibility.
Imagination is a pole star. Even desiring what seems impossible—such as a drastic reduction in working time—helps give direction and raise collective morale. Morale today is one of the main battlefields.
When the discussion turns to technology, Kenobit draws a sharp distinction between “black box” technologies and “our” technologies. Windows and Instagram represent opaque, closed systems. Linux and free software are inhabitable technologies. The use of the Game Boy and the Walkman becomes a critical exercise on our relationship with machines, time, and consumption.
Artificial intelligence enters the discussion through direct work experience. Kenobit describes the devaluation of translation work caused by generative AI and the scarcity of RAM produced by major corporate investments in AI infrastructures. New technologies drain resources and concentrate power.
The proposed response is a practicable path of digital liberation: switching to Linux, abandoning Gmail, experimenting with decentralized messaging systems like XMPP—a path guided by the pleasure of reclaiming fragments of autonomy.
Kenobit tells us that talking about digital liberation only in the abstract is useless. Digital freedom is a process, not a heroic act. If you try to free yourself from all platforms at once, you fail and become depressed. It is the same mechanism by which, if you cannot immediately achieve a perfect world, you convince yourself that nothing is worth doing. Instead, he proposes starting from small, concrete shifts: changing operating systems, changing communication services, experimenting with alternatives—not for purity, but for the tangible pleasure of not giving away one’s data to those who exploit it for profit and control, of not turning one’s existence and life events into commodities to be appropriated and resold by others.
This pleasure is not abstract: it is a real, everyday sensation that can become contagious and represents a value that remains ours, something we no longer allow to be taken away. Here he references a book that was important to him, Pleasure Activism, and recalls a simple idea from it: we improve at the things we practice.
If we practice dependence, we become good at depending. If we practice freedom, even in small doses, we become more capable of telling it, sharing it, and defending it.
Kenobit closes his intervention by returning to the starting point: imagination. Today, he says, we need practices that hold together desire and action, vision and everyday life. We cannot wait for all conditions to be perfect, but we cannot renounce imagining the maximum either. Solarpunk, for him, serves this purpose: to remind us that the future is not only something that happens to us, but something we can still try to write.
At this point, Daniela brings attention to language as an infrastructure of thought to be custom-built for our ideas. This work, she says, can only be done by people specialized in the relationship between form and substance of words—namely, poets.
For this reason, one of the first people involved in the project was Simone Savogin. From the outset, Simone insisted that thought cannot be entrusted to a single voice without losing complexity. It is his idea to establish the Poetreesome: a minimal poetic device that requires at least three people to function. Thought, says Simone, should never be entrusted to a single person, because plurality is a condition of shared truth.
Savogin introduces Notules and Formulas as forms of mobile writing—not definitive truths, but particles of annotated thought that mark a passage. Notules are completed when they circulate, are traversed, questioned, and changed. Through sharing and re-annotation, they condense into Formulas: small forms and at the same time recipes, possible solutions that describe the Solarpunk group’s thinking, its reason for being, what it aspires to, practices, and intends to practice—in a word, its ikigai.
Xenodibi’s intervention starts from the observation of how widespread the idea has become that one must be realistic, and that it is objectively useless to desire anything different from our current living conditions.
We are convinced we are condemned to work ourselves to exhaustion, to procure and consume an endless array of goods that never satisfy us, to be entrepreneurs of ourselves, to feel alone and in competition with everyone else. This is capitalism, baby—and as Margaret Thatcher said, there is no alternative.
But is this conviction really grounded in reality? Capitalism, says Mark Fisher, works because it creates shared beliefs that become real—self-fulfilling prophecies. This is a concept widely demonstrated in contemporary economics, for example through speculative bubbles and inflation expectations, which effectively drive price increases.
But if capitalism works by creating shared beliefs that become real, then those beliefs can also be disarmed.
Dibi speaks of hyperstition as a symbolic technology, a practice of imagining futures capable of affecting reality through the transformation and reworking of shared beliefs.
In this account, Gratuitism emerges as a concrete proposal, capable of breaking the capitalist assumption that scarcity is an inevitable condition.
To speak of gratuitousness, then, means to challenge the idea that every need must pass through the market. The six fundamental needs—housing, food, health, transport, energy, and education—already exist in conditions of abundance, given the immense wealth currently circulating in the global economy. The problem is symbolic and political: that wealth is not perceived as accessible. In the same way, time for relationships and care has been rendered scarce, as has the mental space to imagine the future we desire.
To reclaim these spaces, symbolic and ritual practices are needed. Xenodibi asserts the role of devices capable of breaking isolation, generating contact, and offering care, especially in conflictual moments such as demonstrations. Politics, he argues, cannot limit itself to denunciation: it must also nourish, produce pleasure, hope, and desire, or it exhausts itself. Symbolic and ritual practices are necessary. In this sense, the Fungus of Hyperstition, which will be brought to the demonstration today here in Turin, becomes a device of militant esotericism around which hyperstitional mushrooms prepared at the Paper Lab will be given away—spreading, via a QR code, a possible gratuitist vision of existence.
The Capybara, adopted as a symbol and messenger of the “good life,” is an invitation to suspend disbelief and recognize that scarcity, forced labor, and competition are neither untouchable laws nor desirable or inevitable for those who want a beautiful future.
@alzymologist@sopuli.xyz Write to me at info@apsmiranda.it