Villa Futuro

This website is part of the ongoing project Villa Futuro: Artistic research with digital media around the speculative story of a slum in the middle of nowhere by Gonzalo H. Rodríguez at the scientific/artistic Ph.D. program of the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg.

Here you can accompany and participate in the process of developing storytelling and/or find out about some artistic proposals, papers, activities, sketches, and images related to this project.

If you want to know more about the work in progress of this project, please scroll down.

Mappings

Exhibition

0,5V 0,2mA (And Other Entangled Stories)

Art exhibition at Matjö Raum für Kunst

Opening: Thursday, 11.05.2023 7 pm

Duration: 11.05.2023 – 18.06.2023

Math­i­asstr. 15
50676 Köln – Germany

Tel. +49 (0) 221 258 2113
info@matjoe.de

A group of nomads, a potato, a toy robot, an old woman, a bacterium – Peruvian artist Gonzalo H. Rodríguez gives voice to these human and non-human actors inside. They all helped to build “Villa Futuro”. A fictitious city, which can be walked around by the exhibition visitors as a model made of electronic scrap.

The story of how this city came into being cannot be told linearly. It reveals itself as a narrative structure without a beginning or end, to which visitors can gain individual access via an AR app.

What initially creates the impression of a pile of rubble turns out, upon closer inspection and listening, to be a living city that, with its speculative stories, aims to inspire the wandering exhibition visitors to reflect on topics such as technological globalization, climate change, marginality, and life in the collective.

Text by Daniela Doutch

Funded by:

Stiftung Kunstfonds

Neu Start Plus

Prelude to the stories:

Stories:

Participative fiction

This is a web-based participative story about the beginnings of a marginalized community in the near future called Villa Futuro.

The critical speculation with precarious urban communities contrasts the idea of the “nomad” with the idea of forced displacement and resettlement. “Nomad Settlers” is the denomination for a group forming among displaced people after the climate catastrophe. This group seeks forms of solidarity-based livelihoods and non-violent forms of resistance against a background of extreme deprivation. Within this speculative scenario, the story connects the struggles of similarly marginalized communities in the present with the role of political awareness and creativity in the construction of a shared future is highlighted.

If you want to participate, please select one of the sections of the story below. If you are new here we recommend you watch the introductory video before you continue. Although the sections are developed in chronological order, please, feel free to skip to and choose any section you prefer. Your answers (which are anonymous and confidential) will help the story to be developed a bit further.

How does it work?:

Here you can participate in the creation of a fictive temporary settlement by putting yourself in a situation of displacement. Think about the conditions in which you are put on and navigate the sections below. All collected answers from the sections will be filtered to find coincidences that can give some hints about the progression of the story. To this end, digital images and videos will be continuously created and published. Based on these results, new questionnaires and new digital material can be created so that the timeline of the story is expanded. Then, the process is repeated manually at regular intervals.

Depending on the quantity and quality of responses, the complexity of the story will grow over time. The narrative task is to create the fictional settlement of Villa Futuro collectively and little by little as we participate in the community narrative.

Sections:

Introduction – Arrival

Day 1 – Water Supply

Day 2 – Food Provision

Day 3 – Housing construction

Day 4 – Private and communal property

Day 5 – under construction

back to the media assemblages