Villa Futuro is a media artistic research and an ongoing Ph.D. project about urban marginality, environmental crisis, and narratives of the future situated at Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg. It is inspired by the history of the autonomous urban communities of Villa El Salvador (Peru) and their struggles.
The project emphasizes an ontological approach to the artistic process from which theoretical, political, and technological narratives are assembled in form of a fictive marginal city called “Villa Futuro.” This approach critically unfolds a media art practice that engages with peripheral artistic traditions where discarded materials and marginalized spaces act as cartographies of disruption. In particular, the artistic methodology deals with digital media not as cutting-edge technologies but as narrative entanglements that enable critical multiperspectivism and forms of speculative storytelling.
The project started its artistic production with the recollection of electronic scrap that I have been dismantling. The exhibition “0.5 V 0.2 mA (and Other Entangled Stories)” shows a part of this recollection by reassembling the inner life of the various electronic scrap parts which serve as a basis for a non-linear storytelling. With the use of augmented reality (AR), the entangled stories of the inhabitants of Villa Futuro are explored by wandering around the installed city model.
As a continuation of the research process, a workshop on object storytelling and a panel of discussion around narratology, science fiction, politics, and urban development is taking place within the exhibition’s program. From here, the recollection of electronic scrap continues with the expansion of Villa Futuro as a digital model in the web. The 3d scan fragments of each discarded electronic devises follow the dystopic and utopic stories of the exhibition: they tell us about solidary human collectivities that can survive with forms of self-organization. They tell us more on 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 and hope.