Posthuman Folklore 

A field guide to Chicken Legged Sanctums, 2036

Are we in speculative mythology, or speculative futurology?

We have lived through two more pandemics. In 2030-2032, one after another. Hantavirus and Avian Influenza (H5N1). But the chest-pressing devastation isn't here. You are in a place. A former city, perhaps?

You see a patch of earth, the colors are so vivid (maybe the antihistamines are working, or maybe it's Soma). You see a namelis ant vištos kojelių (Lithuanian: "a little house on a chicken's leg"). You remember it from old tales (Baba Yaga's hut)*. It stands on the spot where, in 2026, you used to walk to a job that told you to use AI "to boost your productivity". There is more than one such hut. They stand where corporations had their offices, where huge shopping centers held their floor space.

What is most curious: beneath them and around them, a lush growth. Not the few exhausted urban trees and lawn worn down by winter road salt, pruned and cut, deprived of humus. Nor the imported species ill-suited to this climate, plagued by disease, that you remember from 2026 city. What grows here are dense bushes, shrubs and pioneer trees. Those menkaverčiai medžiai (Lithuanian: literally "low-value trees" the term real-estate developers used at building sites when "clearing the land" of these "worthless" shrubs and trees). Most often: goat willow (blindės), willows (karklai), wild apple (laukinės obelys), young birches (jauni beržai), alders (alksniai), aspens (drebulės), bird cherry (ievos), hazel (lazdynai), rowan (šermukšniai), grey alder (baltalksniai).

Now they are everywhere around you, those shrubs and the "low-value" trees, sometimes also called non-protected vegetation.

You remember asking yourself, ten trees ago: do trees also think of humans in categories? Do they sort us into valuable and low-value people?

There is a book in your hands. Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present.Are rituals, in 2036, still vanishing? Are there even rituals? You ask yourself. The chicken-legged huts look as if pulled from a folkloric tale. Utterly useless buildings by 2026 standards. New Sanctum, gathering places. Like the apple tree the philosopher mentions, around which a village gathers. An antidote to profanation and to the logic of corporate architecture. 

And then, as inside this illusory dream, a huge insect passes by. Apparently they did not vanish. The Amerindian philosophy texts of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro that you read were right: it was a person in its own right. Everything here seems to be. Not objects, but subjects. What a world this is? Are we still in the land of speculative mythology, or speculative futurology?

*A note on Baba Yaga. The hut on chicken legs is primarily a Slavic folklore motif. Lithuanian and broader Baltic tradition has its own witch figures, the laumė and the ragana, but the chicken-legged hut is not natively Baltic. Through long cultural proximity in the region it nonetheless lives inside Lithuanian popular imagination, and appears here as a consciously borrowed folkloric figure.

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Technical part

A looping video simulation built in the Unreal Engine 3D game engine and rendered as a video. A speculative space, walked through in first-person POV across a mythical land. Projected via projector onto a hanging semi-transparent screen made of home-cast bioplastic, through onto the wall behind it. Rather than existing within fixed borders, the projection disperses across the layer, creating the illusory, dreamy, visionary poveikis (Lithuanian: "effect", "impact on the viewer"). The screen itself is a once-living surface, slightly warped, breathing with the room's humidity. 

The work has not yet been produced, but is straightforward to realize: a video produced from a 3D environment that does not chase ultra-realistic, game-grade rendering, but leans into a funky, dreamy, slightly-off worldbuilding feel and a semi-transparent material to project the work on to.