Longread

The Art of Futuring: Unknown, Unknowable and Uncertain.

This article is intended to provide a brief introduction to working with futures as artists and culture makers. One of the central concerns is how and why Futures can provide useful methods for increasing agency and encouraging co-creation of our collective futures. It is about why futuring is important for everyone, not just corporations and governments. It describes what we at FoAM understand by futuring, our interpretation of the (pre)history of Futures and a few suggestions about where it might be able to take us. It touches on the crossovers between art, design and futures and ends with a proposition for more widespread futures literacy.

Audio

Podcast form Lublin Forum // Maja Kuzmanović: The Art of Futuring. Unknown, unknowable & uncertain

The complex uncertainties of our times make engaging with futures increasingly challenging. What could encourage proactive engagement with these challenges? The various approaches to uncertainty found in futures studies offer some starting points; where futures are iteratively imagined, tested, adapted and integrated into everyday experiences, as a continuous refinement of living in the long now.

Blog

Would my contribution to Reshape be worth more than my carbon footprint?

What could be better than being accepted onto a program where you travel to eight countries in two years?! What better than a chance to travel across Europe moments before our British politicians pull the plug on our countries stability, economy and future and remove the UK from the EU?!

News

Osmotic Knowledge(s)

During the session, we talked about knowledge and especially the sort of knowledge which is not necessarily coming from the institutions (universities, academies, ..). We were talking about how much we are able to learn from each other, from particular experiences, but also how much we tend to forget the need for knowledge that we receive besides the official, canonized streams of education.

News

Making Our Own Monsters with Alica Minar & Col.

Together we imagined ourselves as Monsters, as entities going beyond the normativity, finding our own ways based on shared values, joy and dreams. Later it led us to understand collective work as mycelium, where the individual becomes many and vice versa while trying to listen to the intuition as a hypha.

Blog

Arts and Culture in the Age of Corona

Four days before Reshape Zagreb Intensive was supposed to start, we made a decision to cancel it due to the spreading of coronavirus all over Europe. 80 arts and culture professionals who were supposed to come to Zagreb committed to work online instead of traveling, in order not to jeopardize their own and other people's health.

Blog

RESHAPE closing conference: What kind of future do we want for the cultural sector?

Flanders Arts Institute was partner in RESHAPE, a large-scale EU funded collaboration project (2018-2021) in which 19 partners joined forces to draw a blueprint for a sustainable European arts eco-system that relates with contemporary society. 

Method

Changing the Game: The RESHAPE Transition

This text is a first attempt to join the dots between the proposals, to draft the initial contours of a framework for understanding them. To understand the proposals, it can be useful to first have a brief look at the origins and the promise of RESHAPE, and how the project itself was redesigned and reshaped during an intensive process within the RESHAPE community. Secondly, we begin a reflection on how these proposals might contribute to responding to the current needs within the arts field. In very different ways, these proposals respond to increasing pressures concerning how the arts are organized, governed, and supported (or not).

News

Using Tarot to identify collective vision

During the weekend of 11th - 13th June, Reshaper Petr Dlouhy and his colleagues from Prague based Studio Alta went out of the town and settled in a small camp in the countryside to have a plenary meeting whose main aim was to identify the collective vision of the institution’s future.After sunset, Petr gathered the core team of Studio Alta counting 10 culture workers for a tarot session by the fire. He provided the team with a special reading which was focused on embracing the potential of collective imagination to deal with the current issue(s).

News

Archetypes for a Journey & Governance of the Possible

Presentation of Reshape & A Tarot deck to Reshape the Arts workshop at Saari Well Assembly (Finland)

News

Collectively shaped reading

The proposal for the reading session was to think about collaborations, and ask ourselves: what do they actually mean for us? The idea to approach this frame was to take a step back, to de-construct the role of facilitator and make the session a collectively shaped reading.

News

OutsideInInsideOut

For this occasion, I created a new reading pattern, called after the residency format, OutsideInInsideOut. Through 4 cards we are observing and exploring “what benefits/practices/thoughts we can take from this experience (of being in the residency) to design our own systems/constellations/relationships” - in other words how to abstract obtained experience/knowledge/emotion and transform them in our future processes.

Audio

Alenka Zupančič: The End of Fantasy Versus the Fantasy of the End

For a long time, we were living in a configuration best described as being caught between two ends, expecting the change that never comes. This “end that couldn’t end” on the one hand caused a sense of hopelessness, almost ontological fatigue, and on the other hand, it fueled the fantasies of the end that imagines it through some sort of catastrophic scenario - thus actually maintaining the status quo.

Workshop

Workshop in Potsdam: How can we model economic & funding systems towards more solidarity?

The second workshop in trajectory Solidarity funding.