Agence Future (AF) is an independent futures research collaboration. During the first years of the millennium, photographer Bram Goots and Dr.Maya Van Leemput travelled in 25 countries, spread over five continents to conduct interviews with more than 300 people who shared their ideas, images and feelings about personal, local and global futures. A quarter of their conversation partners were futures experts but many others from widely varied backgrounds took part in the project.
AF engages in finding, studying and creating images of the future. Futures conversations are the backbone of our work to collect, study and create narratives and images of the future. Stories from interviews provide leads for photo and video reportage. Visual documentation, illustration and storytelling are central to the project.
AF is purposefully mullti-faceted, both in the collection phases and in the communication of results. Futures research is combined with artistic and journalistic approaches. The inquiry brings together an eclectic collection of futures conversations and images of the future, resulting in conference presentations, papers, lectures, essays and articles,video-documents, and video-installations, photo-series and exhibitions, web reports, etc...
After a decade of development, Agence Future is expanding and re-shaping its interdisciplinary and cross-media practice with archive development, collaborative and participative approaches and the production of a new series of location based items entitled Reelfutures. The first of the new series of theses video reports was shot, produced and projected at Perpignan during the professional week of the photojournalism festival Visa Pour l’Image.
You can also watch this video with French subtitles here.
For the Arts Centre Vooruit's Homo Futuris festival, we created an installation entitled The Human Scale with five themed loops of interview extracts : FUTURES (shown here), AMBITIONS, BODIES, TECHNOLOGIES, POPULATIONS.
After talking with people all around the globe, we held 35 Agence Future interviews in Antwerp, where I grew up. MuHKA_media commisioned the montage for which we used the same structure as applied in our interview schedule: evolving from personal, to local and then global futures, to finnish with a few bold questions for the imagination.
The port of Antwerp, promising to be a strong actor in the town's futures, was a setting for the opening sequence next to the new Court of Justice, the place most quoted by our conversation partners as "where we could catch a glimps of the future today". Social housing from the outskirts and the demolished old houses of the centre of town as well as the ambitious architectictural project of the new Museum Aan de Stroom, complete the picuture.
When we returned from the first Agence Future fieldtrip, we had held and recorded in some way 382 conversations about the the futures with people in 24 countries on five continents of the globe. Our second video document opened with this sequence of portraits.