Participatory workshop / experiential future scenario / performative action
Agua del Futuro was a participatory workshop and performative action developed during the XI Hemispheric Institute Encuentro, A World Upside Down: Humor, Noise, and Performance, organized by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University in Mexico City.
Created with the Hemispheric research group Play, Celebration, and Power, the project proposed an experiential future scenario around climate change and the coming global water crisis. Participants were invited into the fiction of a company that collects water from human sweat, while UNAM’s internal transport system, the Pumabus, became a time machine carrying them into the 2040s to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Water of the Future.
The workshop used immersive theatre, humour, speculative fiction, and post-experience reflection to make the future tangible in the present. Rather than asking participants to imagine the future from a distance, Agua del Futuro invited them to enter it physically: through movement, collective play, institutional space, bodily imagination, and public action.
The project drew on experiential futures and design fiction methodologies, particularly the idea that future scenarios can be staged as lived situations rather than only described as abstract possibilities. Through this process, spectators became participants in the construction of alternative futures.
In summary, the workshop aims to create a space for participants to transition from mere ‘spectators’ to ‘participants.’ It encourages them to become creators and builders of emancipatory futures by actively engaging with and imagining alternative scenarios for the future. The workshop blends diverse artistic and academic perspectives to explore the dynamic and multi-faceted nature of the future and its impact on society and the world.
Artists and collaborators included Rachel Bowditch, Jessamyn Lovell, Vanessa Ogbuehi, Luis Conde, Camila Aschner, Ángela Marciales, Chris Ignacio, Darling Lucas, Futoshi Moromizato, Alex de las Heras.
WORK GROUP PRESENTATION
15th Saturday
10:00 a.m.—12:00 p.m. / 10H—12H
Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso
- Practice Inside Out: Fiesta, Laughter, and Performance
Speakers: Laura G. Gutiérrez, Alex de las Heras, Pablo Assumpção, Javiera Nuñez Alvarez, Cristina Morales Saro
Moderator: Sebastián Calderón Bentín