As if the usual complexity wasn't enough, this year's Inspire 2023 brought a number of innovations and new complexities. Double in size this year, it hosted 40 young artists working under the guidance of two lead artists Mikhail Karikis and Albert Barqué-Duran. Also, this year by focusing on the theme of the future, INSPIRE attempts to create a framework for the collaboration of art and future studies by attempting to lay the groundwork for similar collaborations in other scientific areas.

The idea for this year's theme was initiated by Areti Leopoulou, curator at MOMus, when we met 3 years ago, at Reworks Agora 2019, where I was presenting the Millennium Project's research on 2050 and Albert (Barqué-Duran) was presenting experiments of art creation (painting and music) in zero gravity conditions. Discussions about the exhibition began immediately, however, the pandemic postponed the project several times, and eventually found myself having the dual role of MOMus president and futures expert (UNESCO Chair & Millennium Project).

The futures lab

The main role of the UNESCO Chair was to enable the dialogue between art and "science" and lay the groundwork for artists to explore and envision different alternative futures.

Using as a source of inspiration the 3 scenarios for 2050 composed by the Millennium Project, a full-day participatory workshop was designed where artists used foresight tools to explore different futures and learned to look into the corners for useful ideas, because the future, we will eventually experience, is usually created at the margins.

So as part of the futures lab, the artists understood the way each one envisions the future differently by traveling through one of Polak's quadrants, spotted megatrends/trends/weak signals/black swans, created alternative future scenarios using Dator archetypes, and created their future selves by playing Cadavre Exquis, a famous surrealist game. Finally, once they felt ready, the 42 artists navigated through the Millennium Project's scenarios for 2050 and put some flesh to them by using the Harman fan method to create, in complete silence, newspaper headlines for 3 different futures.

The INSPIRE exhibition will be open until the 30th of September 2023 at MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece

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INSPIRE 2023: Art and Futures