Villa Futuro is a media artistic research and an ongoing Ph.D. project at Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg about urban marginality, environmental crisis, and narratives of the future. It is inspired by the history of the autonomous urban communities of Villa El Salvador (Peru), among others.
The project emphasizes an ontological approach to the artistic process from which theoretical, artistic, and technological issues are intertwined in a fictive marginal city called “Villa Futuro.” This approach aims to critically unfold media art practices that engage with peripheral artistic traditions where discarded materials and marginalized spaces act as cartographies of disruption. In particular, the artistic methodology deals with new media, such as photometry, augmented reality, and 3D-web-based environments- not as cutting-edge technologies but as narrative entanglements that should enable critical thought, multiperspectivism, and creative forms of speculative storytelling in audiovisual media.
The project started its artistic production with the process of recollection and dismantling of electronic scrap. The exhibition “0.5 V 0.2 mA (and Other Entangled Stories)” shows a part of this process by reassembling the inner life of the various electronic scrap parts which serve as a basis for non-linear storytelling. With the use of augmented reality (AR), the fictive stories of the inhabitants of Villa Futuro are entangled in the installed city model.
As a continuation of the research process, workshops on object storytelling and a panel of discussion around narratology, science fiction, politics, and urban development have been taking place. From here, the recollection of electronic scrap continues with the expansion of Villa Futuro as a digital model on the web. The 3d scan fragments of each discarded electronic device follow the speculative stories of the exhibition: they tell us about human collectivities that struggle to survive with forms of self-organization and solidarity. They tell us more about the life story of an abandoned toy robot that becomes a nest for lizard eggs. Or about the potato experiments generating electricity for the city. They tell us about progress, destruction, marginality, hope, and life.