Alex de las Heras is an artistic researcher working across Situated Futures, artistic research, participatory foresight, AI-mediated practices, performance, installation, and public imagination. His work studies the social life of imagined futures: how communities give form to what has not yet happened, and how those futures return as images, memories, rituals, political demands, and public forms.
He develops Situated Futures, a methodological framework for studying how future imaginaries are produced, mediated, transformed, and returned to public life. Grounded in artistic research, futures studies, and art-based action research, his practice approaches futures not as abstract projections, but as situated social constructions shaped by memory, migration, class, race, violence, institutional promises, everyday life, and collective desire.
Alex holds a PhD in Human and Social Sciences, awarded Cum Laude, from the National University of Colombia. He was a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow in the Connected Minds Programme at York University and a Postdoctoral Visitor at Concordia University, where he was affiliated with CISSC and the PULSE Performative Urbanism Lab. His work has been presented internationally in contexts including Museo Santa Clara de Bogotá, Ars Electronica Festival, UNESCO’s XIV Meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, OÖ Kulturquartier Linz, and Sur Gallery, Toronto.
Across more than 40 artistic works, he has developed performances, installations, public interventions, participatory encounters, AI-mediated visual processes, curatorial projects, and workshops. His current research includes KAIROI — Remembering the Future, a project exploring how members of the Colombian diaspora imagine futures of peace and how those imaginaries become visual traces, collective images, temporal data, and forms of public memory. His broader practice includes projects such as PAN, I Council of Festive Devils, Metágora 2019–2039, and Exotische Provinz Frühschoppen, which trace the development of his work across festivity, political imagination, public ritual, and futures-oriented artistic research.