WORKSHOP Poéticas de Futuros: Anticipaciones, Especulaciones, Temporalidades
As part of its mission to critically engage with temporal imaginaries and apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic narratives, the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University co-organized a significant international event in Mexico City in early 2025. Titled “Poéticas de futuros: anticipaciones, especulaciones, temporalidades” [Poetics of futures: anticipations, speculations, temporalities], the event unfolded as a triad—exhibition, colloquium, and publication—dedicated to exploring poetic and political articulations of the future in contemporary artistic and intellectual practices.
Exhibition
The exhibition is part of a collaborative project between CAPAS, the UNESCO Chair in Future Studies at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) Cuajimalpa, and Galería Metropolitana, with support from the Academia de Artes de México. Hosted in Mexico City, the exhibition examined the ways in which futures are imagined, remembered, and politically mobilized through artistic expression.
Featuring works by artists such as Estrella Carmona, Arturo Miranda Videgaray, Minerva Cuevas, Federico Cuatlacuatl, Nadia Osornio, and Jonathon Keats, the exhibition invited audiences into a trans-historical reflection on anticipatory narratives. It offered critical engagements with alternative temporalities and questioned the prevailing dystopian imaginaries that dominate public discourse.
Curated around themes such as speculation, temporality, and political imagination, the show positioned artistic practice as a key tool in rethinking relationships between past, present, and future. A selection of graphic works from the collection of the Academia de Artes further expanded these conversations, encouraging viewers to consider:
What is the future?
How do we imagine it?
Can art generate new forms of care, collectivity, and hope?
Colloquium
The academic program of the event culminated in a colloquium held on February 27, 2025, at the Auditorio del Museo Nacional de San Carlos, Mexico City. This scholarly gathering deepened the critical discourse initiated by the exhibition. Scholars, artists, and theorists engaged in a dialogue on the political and poetic mechanisms of imagining the future, asking how dominant temporal frameworks shape artistic and cultural production.
The colloquium was coordinated by Adolfo F. Mantilla (CAPAS) and Bruno Gandlgruber (UNESCO Chair at UAM Cuajimalpa), and brought together diverse perspectives on speculative temporalities, post-apocalyptic aesthetics, and cultural strategies for unsettling deterministic narratives of decline or salvation.
Publication
The third component of the initiative is a recently published edited volume, not as a traditional catalog, but as a transdisciplinary object in its own right. Designed to reflect the speculative and poetic ethos of the exhibition, the publication features short essays by over twenty contributors, including former CAPAS fellows Bruna Della Torre, Eduardo Altheman C Santos, and Adolfo Mantilla, in addition to the Centre’s director Robert Andreas Folger and the aforementioned Bruno Gandlgruber. Rather than explaining the artworks, these contributions dialogue with specific pieces or conceptual themes from the exhibition. The volume thus serve both as a critical artifact and a visual object, continuing the project’s commitment to experimental, collective futures-thinking.
The Editorial coordination was led by Bruno Gandlgruber, Analiese Marie Richard, and Anca Miruna Achim, and the publication was released by Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. The volume will soon be translated to English as well. More on that to come!
Link to the event (Spanish): https://cultura.uam.mx/poeticas-de-futuros/
