On Saturday and Sunday, during the public days of the Forecast Forum, 18 creative trailblazers and activists—three in each category—brought their concepts to life through various presentations and talks. At the end of the Forecast Forum, each mentor selects one candidate and accompany their concept to realization over the next nine months.
Saturday, July 6, from 5pm | Sunday, July 7, from 3pm. Check here for schedule.
Ellen Lapper, Last Round of Jaldi Five
Where are you from? No, where are you really from? Visual anthropologist Ellen Lapper researches the Anglo-Indian community in South London. The group, to which her grandparents belong, describes people of mixed descent hailing from the Indian subcontinent during British colonial rule. Many left India after independence, as their affiliation to Britain was stronger. Lapper will now shift her focus to those who decided to stay, and create a visual ethnography of the Anglo-Indian community in India. Last Round of Jaldi Five seeks to challenge our stereotypical nature and widen the discussion surrounding people who find themselves confronted with the legacy of colonial rule.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me
Curator and filmmaker Renée Akitelek Mboya confronts normative modes of knowledge and image production in colonial film archives to trace racist genealogies of displaying black subjects. Her recent project revisits the 1966 Italian film Africa Addio, and re-edits it into a version that subverts its treatment and representation of the continent and its peoples. Made in the “Mondo” genre of pseudo-ethnographic shockumentaries, the original film uses images of rampant violence to present a narrative of post-independence Africa. She thus renders visible the urgency of thinking about racial violence as ontological violence whose idioms are aesthetic, long before they are enacted in social and political spaces.
Bijan Moosavi, Disco Islam
Multimedia artist Bijan Moosavi is a self-described Muslim entrepreneur and Islamic Futurist. His film-in-progress Disco Islam looks at the implications of the expansion of neoliberalism in the Middle East from the prism of an Iranian nightclub belonging to the future. The project aims at addressing issues related to the manufacturing of an Iranian “capitalist realism,” the Middle Eastern patriarchy, the commodification of Islam, and Iran’s environmental time bombs. Moosavi will present the work in the form of a fictional business pitch aimed at potential investors, and using the aesthetics of a product launch.
Josefina Buschmann, Operational Atmospheres
As a researcher working with media to explore the cross between technology, society, and environment, Josefina Buschmann now trains her lens on the Indigenous Mapuche communities, who in recent decades have been treated as terrorists by the Chilean state as they mobilized for the recovery of their lands. Her research-based media project traces the aerial, spectral, and intelligence police operations used to surveil and target Mapuche activists in southern Chile, focusing on two recent cases: the killing of Camilo Catrillanca, and the case known as Operación Huracán, in which police manipulated evidence.
Confusion of Tongues, Moving Membranes
Artist duo Confusion of Tongues (Marthe Prins and Benedikt Weishaupt) analyzes visual rhetoric and image production, aiming to subvert their validity where images constitute reality. Here, they take on the photographs submitted by the staff of Frontex, the governing agency responsible for managing border control in the Schengen Area, for the agency’s annual photo competition. They present a performative installation that focuses on one competition entry in particular: a photograph allegedly rendered from a thermographic dataset and exhibited in 2014. Exploring the entries’ relation to the range of operative imagery produced by the agency, the duo questions whether aesthetic values play a role in Schengen Area border surveillance.
Sue Montoya, rising tides
In her investigative mixed-media installation, Sue Montoya examines the impact of climate change on the communities and ecosystem of Miami-Dade County. Her research began with The Miami Forever bond, a 400 million dollar general-obligation bond expected to mitigate the consequences of rising sea levels in the city of Miami, and maps out local stories, national headlines, excerpts, and images that unpack the changing environment’s past, present, and future challenges with water, infrastructure, wildlife, agriculture, ecosystems, and human health. rising tides embraces the anxious simultaneity of living in the Capitalocene Age.
Olli Aarni, Ajoittua ja sijaita
Musician Olli Aarni proposes a composition that conveys a notion of the mundane, specific to his Finnish culture. Melding field recordings, found objects, the traditional Finnish instrument kantele, and electronic feedback, his aim is not to elevate the sense of the everyday to something grander, but rather to dig deeper into the mundane, the everyday, and humdrum to offer a glimpse of how it feels to be alive in this specific time, space, and cultural context.
SarrSew (a.k.a. Sara Bigdeli Shamloo), Loss in The Living Room: A Homage to Death
Composer and lyricist SarrSew’s solo debut is a multidisciplinary project that addresses her experience with death after losing two of her brothers. It relates themes concerned with the body, in-animation, autopsy, nature, miscommunication, and dysfunction. The project encompasses a musical composition, monologues, projections, and a kinetic machine that will be part of her live act. Each component is also meant to be released separately—as a poetry book, a collection of illustrations and videos, and an album. These elements come together through a live performance.
Dani Kyengo O’Neill (a.k.a. BÜJIN), COUGHING: causes, underlying symptoms, and treatments
Sonic performer, producer, and sound artist Dani Kyengo O’Neill’s proposal centers on an installation using sound and fictitiously composed scores. The piece invites individuals to explore how listening faculties are socially conditioned and increasingly influenced by technology. She will look at play and storytelling through notions of shame, memory, pleasure, trauma, loss, and the post-internet social identity, and examine how these impact the way we experience and consume, how we see one another.
Jonas Madden-Connor, Grave Wounds
In his graphic novel, Jonas Madden-Connor intends to create a pulpy vampire tale that also deals with race relations and the search for an artistic voice. Set in World War II, the story’s protagonist is an African-American GI whose entire squad is killed in battle. He is brought to a nearby castle to recover, along with the other survivor, a German soldier. When the two discover that their hostess is a vampire, they must work together to escape.
Mónica Naranjo Uribe, Underneath the Surface
Monica Naranjo Uribe proposes a graphic publication that looks at scientific thought from an emotional perspective. She attempts to create a visually driven narrative that conveys slow-moving geological processes. Naranjo argues that there’s a great poetic potential inherent in scientific descriptions, in particular in the field of geology. By giving such texts a visual translation, she seeks to create new metaphors for understanding the world around us.
Eugène Riousse, Banana Split
Eugène Riousse’s comic book takes place on an island, where a community of half-human, half-fruit creatures live peacefully among the island’s inhabitants. But the sudden death of their leader and major political shifts disturb their status among the island’s population, who suddenly become hostile. Led by Colette, the leader’s daughter, the semi-fruits plan their resistance and exodus. But when she discovers a dark truth about her father, Colette decides to leave the island alone. The book alternates between drawing styles to distinguish backgrounds and characters and to lend the story a moody atmosphere.
Peter Behrbohm and Anton Steenbock, ZIZ – Total.Earth
Peter Behrbohm and Anton Steenbock’s project asks: Why is it easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? The two propose an app, developed by a fictitious startup, that takes the sharing economy to its ultimate conclusion, rendering any form of possession prohibited, and thus making everything free. Could consumerist individualism flip into utopian communism? Would total availability cause reduction instead of growth? Could karma credits replace money? These are some of the questions they seek to explore with a futuristic business model that clandestinely tries to save the world.
Parasite 2.0, Nasty Job
The trio Parasite 2.0 argues that it’s time to rethink how we envision the human habitat and with it, the forms of social relationship that spatial organization generates. They suggest an alternative spatial experience that breaks with architectural norms, basing their research on adult “playgrounds” such as the club, the squat, and sex-related environments, like swinger clubs and darkrooms. Applying design elements found there, they seek to create a pedagogical playground for adults and experiment with new forms of interactions.
Questions Collective, The Auction of Venice
Questions Collective’s interactive installation is a science-fiction piece proposing the end of the accounting paradigm. Ever since the invention of balanced bookkeeping, life and the world have been categorized as divisions of credit and debit moving toward equilibrium. But you cannot balance an ocean with a dolphin orphanage. And now, Venice—the birthplace of balanced bookkeeping—is sinking as a result of climate change. In order to put an end to a system at the core of our harmful behavior, Questions Collective is putting the city up for sale, offering you the unique opportunity to be part of this exciting financial endeavor.
Caty Enders, The Forever Show
We’ve never been closer to achieving immortality. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in health, biotech, and artificial intelligence, we seem poised to crack the code of aging. At the same time, life expectancy in the United States actually declined in 2018, with the average American facing record levels of chronic disease, suicide, and addiction. In an innovative podcast and immersive audio installation, science journalist Caty Enders delves into surreal advances in biomedical research and explores where our various backdoors out of death might lead.
Caroline Lester, Justice Denied (Working title)
During World War II, two groups of people were forcibly relocated by the American government. The story of one of those groups—the Japanese Americans—has been widely told. That of the Alaskan Natives, however, has been largely overlooked. In 1942, the United States government claimed nine Aleutian villages for strategic use, and distributed the Unangax̂, who lived in those villages to five abandoned canneries. By the end of their internment, ten percent of the population had died. Caroline Lester will examine the twin stories of internment, and why they diverged, through an audio documentary and an interactive website.
Melissa Pinel, (Un)Just cause: the lost voices
It’s been 30 years since the United States invaded Panama, on December 20, 1989, to capture dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega. In her podcast series, Melissa Pinel collects personal stories and archival material that shed light on the devastating violence that took place during the two weeks it took to capture him. They are, for example, the stories of the veterans who fought to catch the dictator of a foreign country; the bereaved families of those who died and whose bodies rest in unknown places; the citizens who lost everything when fires consumed their houses; the ones who who took advantage of the chaos; and the voice of the civic resistance.
