2021 Berlin
The transdisciplinary open-air exhibition FuturePerfectLand playfully appropriated the format of a travelling funfair as a provocative curatorial format. Seven newly commissioned, immersive artworks staged speculative realities shaped by the escalation of environmental change – manifestations of what happens when humanity simultaneously embraces and undermines the reality of the climate crisis, and rewrites the story of collapse. These site-specific, immersive, participatory and transdisciplinary environments submerged the audience in a liminal world on the border between reality and fiction through auditive, visual, performative, narrative and somatic strategies.
A former distillery in Berlin-Reinickendorf was transformed into a haptic, affective and performative fairground, set against the backdrop of industrial brick buildings overtaken by wild greenery. Removed from the constraints of dystopianism, FuturePerfectLand provided a space for playfulness, child-like curiosity, suspicion and the belief in magic – some of the primal human capacities that underline the ability to adapt.
FuturePerfectLand was realized with the kind support of HauptstadtKulturFonds. The preparatory mediation project Welcome to FuturePerfectLand was funded by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
The mediation concept for FuturePerfectLand was developed in the frame of the preparatory project Welcome to FuturePerfectLand (2021). Collaboratively with the participating artists, it researched strategies of on- and off-boarding for the spatial and performative mediation of immersive art. Welcome to FuturePerfectLand was funded by Fonds Darstellende Künste in the frame of the NEUSTART KULTUR #TakePart programme.
The concept for FuturePerfectLand came into being as a result of the curatorial research project Futur(e) Perfekt (2020). Approaching the climate crisis not as a technical-scientific condition of collapsing environmental systems but as a collective social, cultural and psychological crisis of imagination, the participating artists developed speculative future scenarios that oscillate between the reality of unfolding climate change and the optimism of a potential mitigation of its consequences. Futur(e) Perfekt was realized with the Initialförderung of the Fonds Darstellende Künste.
participating artists: Betty Böhm, Jorge Castillo Chavarria, Paul Chaney, Shelley Etkin & Frederike Doffin, Valeria Germain & Andrea Krohn, Christoph Rothmeier, Gabriel Vallecillo Márquez, Sofia Nordmann & Alexander Bieß, Raul Kirchhoff & Caique Tizzi, Andreas Heim, William Russell, and Aurelie Richard
Lianne Mol 