Meaning of the image: a tree with deep roots — the ancestral compass (Ayni, Wa) — that connects the earth with human beings holding hands in a circle, and with non‑human animals, all beneath a spiral sun that evokes reciprocity and that horizon toward 2084. The warm, earthy colors aim to convey the idea of “good living” and holistic health that runs through the manifesto, in contrast with the extractivist logic denounced in the text.
Below are guidelines reflecting the work carried out in the Commission on Health, Biopolitics, and Well‑Being. We decided to craft a manifesto for a new kind of health — a health for the year 2084 — one that includes all species, human and non‑human, as well as the environment that shelters us: the earth, the seas, the rivers, the skies, and more.
Here is a new perspective on health. A perspective that challenges us and seeks to challenge others in their daily, everyday relationship with everything around them: the environment and its elements, non‑human animals, and human animals. A perspective that engages with the daunting reality we are living in, marked by the perpetuation of the destructive forces of a capitalism whose drive for profit maximization devastates everything and everyone. For this reason, we call for the construction of a new health paradigm that proposes a regeneration of its dimensions, drawing deep roots from our history and projecting toward 2084 a future that allows us to flourish in fullness:
1. We promote a deeply social and spiritual health: we reject the fragmented conception of health as merely an individual or biological matter. We reaffirm that health is a profound and reciprocal relationship built through being with others — human and non‑human animals — with the territory/environment, and with the universe. We are relational beings. Just as there is no health or care when other beings are subjected to violence, neither is there health when the earth is sick or when well‑being is threatened by pollution.
2. We reclaim ancestral traditions as a compass: we draw on Ayni from Andean worldviews — reciprocity as the foundation of good living — and on Wa from Eastern philosophies — harmony as an organizing principle. We envision a relational, horizontal, reciprocal, and holistic health that retrieves the ancestral to project what is possible. Body, mind, spirit, and emotions are not separate compartments; they are parts of a whole whose balanced well‑being is the condition for vibrant health.
3. We act against the extractivism of capital: we openly oppose the savage capitalism that degrades the environment, exploits bodies, and commodifies care. We denounce and reject Spiritual Extractivism, which transforms ancestral practices into self‑help commodities, emptied of meaning and sold as “mindfulness” to the highest bidder. Alongside this, we firmly reject all other forms of extractivism: material, symbolic, emotional, and spiritual.
4. We embrace a plural, non‑hegemonic medicine: without rejecting Western medicine, we accept and incorporate it into a reciprocal and respectful dialogue with the multiple paths of healing that address the complexity of the body‑territories we inhabit. We include it, but we do not accept its monopoly. We seek to erase the borders that limit access to healing practices. Our future is to inhabit a tomorrow where “good living” is the horizon for a collective, dignified, and harmonious health.
5. We call for unlearning imposed paths and creating new ones: the familiar routes we have been made to walk are embedded in imposed logics of class, gender, ethnicity, and age that have disciplined and hierarchized bodies. We call for imagining and living another way of inhabiting the diverse aesthetics of bodies and their care — one that does not hierarchize, pathologize, or exclude.
6. We proclaim the construction of new knowledge: a new habitat, a new health, requires the constant creation of new collective knowledge that challenges the health models that make us sick. We call for imagining a future health that places shared happiness, reciprocity, and justice at its center.
We launch this manifesto from our country, Argentina, but through the joint work of colleagues from the Global South, who reflect on and debate the role we have as a region. In that exchange, in that relationship, we call for building a new health, a new well‑being, and a new biopolitics for 2084.
This proposal is the result of the International Seminar-Workshop · Imagining Alternative Futures from the Global South: Contributions from the Social Sciences of Latin America for the Future.
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The following text explains how the seminar-workshop was carried out:
Imagining Alternative Futures from the Global South: Contributions from the Social Sciences of Latin America for the Future
We present this academic activity organized in 2025 jointly by the Chair of the History of American and Argentine Political and Social Ideas (FFyL-UNCuyo), the Social Sciences and Health Program of FLACSO – Argentina, and the Chair of Problems of Historical Knowledge (UNSur). It included participants from various parts of the world, mainly Latin America and the Caribbean.
It was not a science fiction exercise nor a technological projection detached from reality. It was, above all, a historical act. From the perspective of the History of Ideas, futures are not mere linear anticipations of the present, but cultural constructions shaped by power struggles, horizons of expectation, reinterpretations of the past, and intellectual traditions. To think about 2084 from the Global South means critically questioning the hegemonic imaginaries that often define what progress and development are, as well as which ways of life are considered desirable. It means opening the possibility of imagining alternatives rooted in our own historical experiences.
Latin America and the Caribbean have been, since their modern constitution, territories intensely projected toward the future. Not only as promise or subordinated periphery, but also as spaces of transformative imagination. The Latin American intellectual tradition has reflected this. Since the 19th century, thinkers and intellectuals of the region dared to conceive different realities, to question structural dependencies, and to project emancipatory horizons. Their ideas were not mere diagnoses of their time, but interventions in history: attempts to influence “Our America.”
Recovering those voices today — from José Martí to José Carlos Mariátegui, or more recently Rigoberta Menchú — does not mean returning to the past as a nostalgic exercise, but activating a genealogy of political and cultural imagination that continues to challenge us. Many intellectuals understood that to think about Latin America was to imagine it differently: autonomous, integrated, socially just, culturally affirmed. In this sense, imagining 2084 does not inaugurate a new practice, but inscribes itself in a regional tradition of producing possible futures.
The international course aimed precisely to activate that tradition. Through exercises of imaginary travel to 2084, the production of narratives, drawings, and conceptual proposals, along with spaces for critical dialogue, participants explored possible scenarios for our societies. The imaginations generated addressed issues related to technology, daily life, the environment, politics, social bonds, ways of inhabiting territory, among other topics. Each production was understood not as prediction, but as a question: what fears, desires, and tensions of the present are projected into that imagined 2084?
The activities were not limited to individual creation. Collective discussion, interdisciplinary exchange, and the connection between future scenarios and historical debates that have shaped the region — dependency, integration, modernity, inequality, cultural identity — were promoted. In this way, the prospective exercise also became a tool to better understand the present.
The purpose of this experience was to strengthen a situated literacy of futures: a critical capacity to recognize that narratives about tomorrow influence decisions made today. Imagining from the Global South means disputing meanings, amplifying voices, and building horizons that do not automatically reproduce external models. The productions incorporated into the Museum of Imagined Futures are part of that collective archive where the future ceases to be an imposed destiny and becomes a field of shared creation.
Imagining 2084 from Latin America and the Caribbean is, ultimately, an act of historical responsibility. It means recognizing that futures are not given, but constructed; that ideas matter; and that our region has been, and can continue to be, a fertile space for thinking and creating possible worlds.
For this reason, we present here the final results of the work of the commissions formed during the course, composed of a heterogeneous group both in disciplinary training and geographical location. That diversity — far from fragmenting the experience — enriched the debate, broadened perspectives, and allowed local realities to be contrasted with shared problems at regional and global scales. The final works presented are propositional, original, and critically grounded; they do not offer closed answers, but argued scenarios that articulate historical memory, diagnosis of the present, and political imagination. They express the conviction that permeated the entire experience: that imagining the future is also a way of exercising intellectual citizenship and collectively assuming the task of thinking — and disputing — the horizons of tomorrow.
Authors: Lic. Renzo Molini, Dr. Walter Camargo