description: We need to remind ourselves that the future is never empty, never a blank space to be filled with the output of human activity. It is already colonized by what the past and present have sent to it.’ (Fry, 2020, p.10). From the environmental crisis to social inequality, the shortcomings of the current dominant system have become ever more apparent across the globe. The crises of the modern world and their colonial legacy seem insurmountable. In this critical moment of history, FICT, a group of anthropologists, designers and artists, have come together as autonomous local collectives called “fragments” to imagine alternative presents; utilizing speculative thinking to create alternative histories as a means to defamiliarize European colonialism and nurture hope for new worlds to come. Speculation as a research technique opens the space of possibilities and allows us to offer a meaningful critique of our times by proposing other realizations; versions of other timelines that could have happened but did not. Anthropologist Arturo Escobar argues that our understanding of the world is dominated by Euro-centric ideas, and a tendency to believe “we all live within a single world, made up of one underlying reality (one nature) and many cultures” (2017, p.86). This problematic worldview, arising from European colonization followed by Modernism and later global Capitalism, continues to uphold the singular ‘correctness’ of this Western worldview, precluding alternative possibilities of being and knowing. FICT’s ultimate goal is to decolonize this Euro-centric worldview we inherit from history and cultivate different possibilities through historical speculation. On this website, you will find 6 speculative techniques that emerged from 20 fictional histories, explored by 54 participants from 9 countries. The starting point is an exercise in imagination: What if European colonization had not taken place? The prompt takes the Black Plague as the point of divergence. Specifically, it urges participants to imagine that the Black Plague killed off 80% of what we call Europe now, leaving the region in shambles. As a result, the Enlightenment, colonialism, and Modernity as we know it never happened. Participants are thus asked to imagine the non-colonized worlds that might have emerged from this science fictional alternative point of divergence. You will encounter different artifacts from alternative timelines and through them, glimpse the richness and complexity of these speculative worlds. For us, speculation is a decolonizing undertaking: making use of what imagination and knowledge can offer to transcend the limitations of “what is” today, towards “what can be” tomorrow, via the speculation of “what could have been.” We hope you enjoy and utilize some of the techniques for future practices.