Future street

Use

Very pleasant hunt for ready-made signals. You look at an environment and decide that the future will be exactly like that. You can't help but be surprised by the picture that presents itself to you. The challenge is to give a fairly coherent interpretation of the whole. – Also a good way to connect with the place where you are working (almost every city has a Future Street, Toekomststraat, rue de l'avenir...).

Protocol

We start from the very serious presumption that the local Future Street is the future, that it is a street of a certain city somewhere in the future. We take our cameras, phones and sketchbooks and go on a scrupulous tour. We inspect. There is the architecture, the environment, the state of the soil, the flora and fauna, there are the shops, the cul-de-sacs, what is public and what is privatised. There are the colours, the traffic and the movement of the population. You connect all these dots together, you interpret the signals as you like.

One way to develop the experience is to write a scenario based on this investigation and invite a group to a guided walk down Future Street. The scenario can then be shared by reading excerpts or by having the group listen to fragments previously recorded on a telephone or tape. The fun thing is to also practice 'erasure'. For example, you visit a shop but you take away the concept of a shop. You say: I am in a place where people are weighing vegetables and fruit.

The walk can be interspersed with various sensory, somatic and futurological experiences such as Word world building (p. ), Sensorial inspection (p. ), Singing exercises (p. ), Mental projection (p. ), Hunting for weak signals (p. ).

This exercise can become a real super-produced creation. You can hide objects in shops and public spaces. This turns you into a time travel guide and modulates the level of immersion and involvement of the visitors. We can also simply invite visitors to create their own scenario or propose just a few exploration exercises in the pre-existing scenario.

At the end of the experience, visions and interpretations can be shared. This can be done in a sweat lodge or around a fire or with a beer. The important thing is to be around.

Testimonies

In Kortrijk we went to the Toekomstraat with Mathilde and Rasa several times. It was a lot of fun. The signals were very confusing but it was a lot of fun to interpret them. We can also say that these are the places that call for activities and that stimulate the hacking of certain exercises and protocols. We encountered a military surplus and camping and costume shop at the entrance itself. We also found a charming and romantic park with very old trees, a pond and century-old gazebos. It looked like a real wedding garden and obviously contrasted with the pop, funny and spooky atmosphere of the military surplus. Finally, another notorious encounter was a rather high-tech prosthetics shop, with a lot of colourful, flashy and fancy accessories like funky back belts and a collection of fluorescent stockings. It's a pretty radical exercise full of paradoxes. On the one hand we are forced to work with what exists, on the other we allow ourselves to deviate entirely from the present.

Anna Cz.

Credits

Rasa ., our powerful mage, invented this exercise in collaboration with Mathilde M.. They tested it on several occasions. Actress, director and performer Clara Thomine shines in the trick of erasure.

This article was written by Anna Cz.