Nelly Ben Hayoun’s new project: Disaster Playground will be exhibited at Z33, House for Contemporary Arts, in Belgium

With Future Fictions, Z33 continues the debate about our future, exploring how contemporary artists, designers and architects relate to future thinking and imaging: from mapping, questioning and criticizing, to developing complex visions about the structures and systems that may shape our life in the future.

Z33 wishes to draw attention to what future thinking and imaging can be. Not pretending to know what our future will be, nor which inventive solutions will solve our present-day problems, we rather aim to explore a set of different visions/fictions that artists, designers and architects put forward using different methods and tools for future thinking and visualizing.

In doing so, Z33 wishes to shift the debate away from what is possible, plausible and probable towards what is preferable: Future Fictions therefore is essentially a project about ideas and ideals, about dreams beyond hope and fear.

Can we learn to critically assess the future visions presented? Which criteria would be valid in doing so? In other words, can we learn to become ‘future literate’?

The proposed visions/fictions presented aim to engage us both intellectually as well as emotionally in a quest to consider exactly what kind of future we might want. In this, we all have a role to play: ‘After all, the future still has to be made today.’