‘Futuro Modular’ at Rachel Uffner hosting EMBAJADA

The portrayal of the future in western culture is in constant flux, an ongoing imaginary construction, assembled by memories or ideas of what that future could look like. The once technicolor optimism of the sixties and seventies which included visiting aliens, flying cars or a holiday to Mars gives way to a more cynical and imaginative vision of the future, rendered in muted tones of sepia or dark silver green. Ridley Scott’s 1982 dystopian science fiction film Blade Runner, set in what was imagined to be our present day, November 2019, featured flying cars, intelligent robots, a crumbling climate and an existential crisis. While this vision of the future still feels farfetched, we find ourselves inching closer to this imagined future. Video calls, 3D printing, and automatic cars are technologies current today that seemed impossible only fifteen years ago, meanwhile urgent climate changes threaten the earth’s survival. As Albert Einstein stated, “I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.”

Futuro Modular brings together a varied group of artists that help to create a fictional DIY experience and installation that ruminates on the idea of future. The exhibition uses the second floor of the gallery as an imaginary spaceship, a vehicle idea that inherently bears the marks of a progressive society. A spaceship’s contents, in this case the artworks, as well as the motives of its occupants, the artists, imagine an ambiguous and open-ended future, suspending absolute terms of salvation and destruction.

Text by Christopher Rivera