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Ph by Elena Beregatnova

About Future: Thoughts about and for Tomorrow
Spazio Millepiani, Rome | December 6, 2019 – January 2, 2020

Curator A. Muratore

“No future” – sang the Sex Pistols at the end of their personal British anthem’s (anti)version, “God Save the Queen”. It was 1977 then, and the destructive gust punk gave to the world – or at least to whom were into punk-music and culture – abolished, banned the future from our lives. Well, at least that were the intentions. Because, in the end, the future has always been in our minds, in our hearts, it lies in the way we think and it is something difficult to eradicate. If there was a past and there is a present, there must be another entity, another time-dimension. Otherwise, why does the future tense exist? Why all the efforts, the investments and thoughts about that? Why do we ask fortune-tellers and astrologists to tell us something about our future? Why did Futurists want to erase the past, burning museums, destroying traditions and conformity, in the name of something that was not there yet?

What about future, then?

We can try to answer these questions by visiting the namesake exhibition, “About Future”, organised by Loosenart and set up at Spazio Millepiani in Rome. Open to public from the 6th December 2019 to the 3rd January 2020, the group exhibit visualises and boosts different kinds of future; it shows several possibilities about what we all are going to experience tomorrow, next year, in two centuries, maybe. Or maybe not. In this blurred uncertainty, reality mixes up with fantasy and science fiction – and the results are amazing, when not visionary.

The artists selected for the exhibition – more than 60 from all around the planet – collected their thoughts, told their stories, interpreting them visually and translating them into digital-and-photographic works. Some of them chose to describe our forthcoming existence in a dark way, trapping humans in small cages or depicting them as duplicated humanoids enlisted in an obscure army trooping towards an unknown destination. As if George Orwell wrote a sequel of “1984”, with an even more disturbing plot. On the other hand, instead, a number of artists introduce and manifest optimistic features, giving trust to technology in its multiple shapes and potentials. It will probably become an extension of our body, massively influencing and redirecting our lives. Or what about sophisticated hi-tech programs able to substitute not only workers, but even art itself, by creating impossible images and compositions?

Natural sciences will be different in the future, as well as nature as we know it. Colours will perhaps change and new landscapes will open before our eyes. But now it’s time to go back to the present, enjoying the exhibition.

Text by Silvia Colombo

Works by Evan Hume; Rhea Gupte; Yuliya Pavlova; Kateryna Borovschi