The Museum of Futures is under construction. The Museum of Futures is built in time rather than space, activating local nodes of creative speculation about the future. Its heritage does not only consist of a compilation of objects from the past with global historical or aesthetic value, but of local impressions of the future with creative, speculative and cultural value. This museum does not simply collect and preserve heritage from the past but rather stimulates, communicates, analyzes and disseminates imagination about the future. A future that is not necessarily technological, but a creative game about the everyday. The legacy of the Museum of Futures is unspecific and at the same time absolutely necessary. The founding idea of this museum is playful speculation about Latin American identities.
The Museum of Futures opens a series of local public calls for the creative production of imagined futures and invites the sharing of speculative, creative, collective experiences. It is a laboratory of shared futures.
We use the idea of the contemporary museum as a metaphor to structure this collective work. The Museum of Futures has five operational functions for the general project, 2084 Imagined Futures from the South:
- conservation (digital archives about the future);
- curation (narrative threads);
- production (publication);
- mediation (liaison with and between local audiences); and
- communication (dissemination).
The Museum of Futures is part of the general project 2084 Imagined Futures from the South. It is a specific mechanism to address one of the four activities of this project: to gather and share imaginations of the future activated in different communities in various Latin American cities. The 2084 project takes the creative samples shared through this museum as an input to build dialogues between citizens and specialists from diverse fields and different cities. These dialogues will produce documented knowledge that will be connected with decisionmakers, converting the results of the calls into pragmatic inputs to transfer the results to government agencies and other interested actors.
