Time is not a line, it’s a question. Every decision, every memory, every vision of what could have been or still could be is an act of creation. The future is a contested territory.
Time is not a line.
The future is no longer announced: it is imposed. On our calendars, on our devices, in the algorithms that predict our choices before we even think them. We live in a present without respite, hijacked by the logic of performance and anticipation.
Mark Fisher spoke of the slow cancellation of the future. Today, that cancellation is no longer slow: it is interface, scroll, notification, urgency… chronophagy. A time devouring itself, condemned to the frantic repetition of the immediate, leaving no space for the sedimentation of thought or the construction of futures.
Collapse is the horizon and nostalgia, the trench.
Our imaginaries of the future have been hijacked, reduced to scenarios of crisis. We accept collapse not as a possibility, but as a destiny. We are orphans of the future in a present that seems incapable of offering new cultural | social | political | ecological forms.
Nostalgia, as read through Svetlana Boym, can be reactionary or emancipatory. Not all yearning looks backward: there are nostalgias that sow the future.
A Speculative Archaeology
Future Nostalgia is not a backward glance nor an exercise in melancholy, but a critical excavation of those technological, social, and political paths that were once possible but never came to pass. Today, in the midst of systemic collapse, these paths could be reactivated as tools of resistance and care.
The exhibition invites us to an exercise of speculative archaeology: What if, instead of microchips, we had continued developing Andean khipus as a memory technology? What if computation were a fermented, vegetal, symbiotic practice? What other futures are woven when our infrastructures are designed not from extractivism, but from interdependence?
The works compose a speculative constellation that does not merely represent futures, but rehearses them as a living compost of memories, struggles, and possible worlds.
Three curatorial coordinates
The following concepts serve as a compass for navigating the works:
Permacomputing
Technologies that do not maximize, but adapt. Computation with limits. Processes that seek not infinite efficiency, but equilibrium. It is not just about programming better, but about reconfiguring our relationships with the living, in all its diversity.
Holobiont
All technology is a network of relationships. As in a forest, all life is the result of the coexistence of multiple species in permanent collaboration and exchange. The artworks, like organisms in symbiosis, form nodes of a vital network that amplifies mutual sustainability.
Compost
There is no innovation without decomposition. Every technological promise produces waste, but it can also generate fertile ground. Compost is the art of transformation and, simultaneously, the natural technology upon which all living beings are based: to transform what was into potential for what is to come.
IMAGE GALLERY
THE BOOK
Nostalgia for the Future, the book is not just a book. It is a crack in time, a vibration that precedes the exhibition.
An interactive book that imagines possible futures from worlds already resonating in the present. Through narratives woven with speculative science fiction, technopoetic critique, and living archives, the book offers a journey through realities where water remembers, bacteria engage in dialogue, and sound weaves memory. This literary prequel not only accompanies the exhibition: it precedes it, prefigures it, and summons it.
Because to inhabit other worlds, we must first tell their stories. And for them to exist, we must imagine they have already been here.
Nostalgia for the Future transforms the curatorial discourse into an interactive fiction, a “choose-your-own-adventure” that translates the exhibition’s core themes into narrative decisions. Each choice leads the reader through thematic routes that preview the artworks and concepts they will later encounter in the gallery, inviting them to inhabit these spaces from within.
The project expands beyond the book through an urban campaign: a series of stickers distributed across the city that act as portals. By scanning them, the public gains access to instructions for obtaining the book for free and to the announcement for the exhibition. Thus, the methodology articulates curation, fiction, and mediation, generating a transmedia journey that prepares the visitor for the exhibition experience and turns reading, the city, and the exhibition into a single, unified narrative space.
CREDITS
Curators: Eurídice Cabañes y Luca Carrubba
Museoghraphy: Meritxell Ahicart
Production: Luca Carruba
Curatorial support: Jara Rocha
Project produced with the support of Barcelona Producció 2025.
La Capella, Instituto de Cultura de Barcelona, 2025
Artworks and Artists
- Autonomy of Things / EmErgEncE de Xavi Manzanares
- BSM/MTHCv3 [Bionic Sound Machina | More Than Human Composer] de Oscar Martín Correa
- MICROuniversos de Hamilton Mestizo Reyes
- Wiñotuay chi lewfü (El río volverá) de Maria Ignacia Ibarra y Wladimir Riquelme Maulén
- Atuel de Cooperativa Matajuego
- Khipu | Computador Prehispánico Electrotextil (edición 2) de Constanza Piña Pardo
- 2.8B420k de Andy Gracie
- Radiofonic sculptural dialogue de Rabía Williams
- Nostalgia de Futuro: el libro de Eurídice Cabañes
- Más allá del colapso: ecos del futuro de Eurídice Cabañes y Luca Carrubba, con producción sonora de Mathias Klenner
- Secreto Ancestral VR de Francisca Silva y María José Díaz.