Abstract
Prefigurative politics are “world-making” events. They enact alternative ways of being, knowing and doing in spaces of resistance and experimentation. What insights does prefiguration in design(ing) hold for the politics of prefiguration? In exploring this affinity, I dive into a photograph of my twenty-year-old self that pivots around the maquette of the “Constellation.” In this memoir I delve into my experience of prefiguration as an architecture student and member of a counterculture in Greece in the mid-1980s. The maquette performs a double prefigurative: Like every design prototype, it acts in the present tense while it also signals a future desired change. Yet the project also manifests a prefigurative function via its particular countercultural affiliation, even if its political goals remained elusive. The courses of action encountered in this memoir defy the entrenched dualities of collectivity/individuality, embodiment/language, users/designers, futures/presents. The memoir contributes to the study of prefigurative politics by underscoring the assembling of matter into form as a capacitor of the prefigurative imaginary at work.