An interview with our Creative Director Irini Papadimitriou for SCENARIO Reports, Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies

How can futures thinking play an active part in everyone’s lives?

People need to be better at asking questions. We often don’t interrogate what’s happening around us because things happened in a certain way in the past. This includes realising that the future we might want is not necessarily what we are being fed by a very small group of powerful people. Futures thinking holds the power to foster greater agency as soon as we realise that it is possible to play a role in shaping the future and getting one step closer to where one wants to be. I see art as a way to craft ideas of the future with the public, and in that sense, I see art-led futures thinking as a form for gentle activism.

How do you see futures shaping art, and art shaping futures?

Artists have always either depicted futures or presented us with different worlds, narratives, and perspectives in their work. From Thomas More’s Utopia to the apocalyptic worlds in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, or William Heath’s satirical illustrations of technological progress in the early 19th century in March of Intellect, artists have long been interrogating ideas about potential futures. Art questions our obsessions with futurism, while also predicting and inventing new future ideas. Artists, through their work, remind us how our actions in the present affect future generations in a similar way that current issues or injustices continue from past events. I guess thinking about futures, one would assume positive change, but in challenging times like this it’s hard to imagine futures that are better from where we are, so I feel we need art and artists to help us see ways to envision and re-imagine positive futures again. I always think of Agnes Denes’ Tree Mountain as a beautiful example of work created to benefit future generations rather than the people who actually put the care and labour into it.