From June 19 to September 7,  2025
Curators: Paolo Cardini y  Karla Paniagua
Programa de Diseño, Moda y Arquitectura

Project Space

Artists:

Bruno Alcántara, Alfredo Amaya, Camila Anaya, Hussein Arellano, Mercedes Baltazar, Jaqueline Barreda, Shiro Beta, Matilde Breña, Carlos Carmona, Jorge Cejudo, Elena Cruz, José De la O, Andrea De la Peña, Gary Dueñas, Fernanda Enríquez, Alejandra Enzáztiga, María Renée Estrada, Edgar Flores, Alexa Garduño, Diana Georgina García-Rojas, Diana García, Francisco Raúl García, Anni Garza Lau, Raúl Gonzalez, Iván Hernández, Karla Guadarrama, Camila Guerrero, Ivonne Lonna, Adair López, Arturo López, Patricia López, Bertha Martínez, Vicente Martínez, Amor Muñoz, Francisco Javier Mesa, Paola Morales, Karla Denisse Muñoz, María José Olvera, Juliana Ordóñez, Miguel Ortíz, María Fernanda Otálora, Cecilia Palacios, Andrea Ponce, Eduardo Peñafiel, Sebastián Quiroga, Vera Rábago, Eugenio Ricárdez, Alejandra

Rosillo, Frida Ruiz, Miriam Ruiz, Lizbeth Saavedra, Alan Sáenz, Leonardo Santiago, Gabriela Salinas, Lourdes Serrano, Natalia Silva, Emilio Sosa, Diego Trujillo, Amalia Vásquez, Beatriz Vega, Karina Vega, Israel Viadest, Martha Vilchis, Johann Weigend, Elena Yepes, Emanuel Zámano, Lizette Zavala, Diana Zendejas, Patricio Zepeda, Elizabeth Zuñiga, Encuadernación Aatzin, Taller Vilab.

“However, when science fiction thinking opens itself to design thinking, larger problems appear. These have to do with speculative culture generally, the way that our society imagines itself through its forward-looking disciplines. Many problems I once considered strictly literary are better understood as interaction-design issues.”

Bruce Sterling, “Design Fiction”

Dispatches from the Future: Exercises in Latin American Speculative Design consists partly of objects produced in the framework of the Global Futures Lab Mexico, partly of pieces created in the CENTRO Soundscapes of the Future Laboratory, and finally of pieces by artists who generously accepted the invitation to include work they had produced independently in the language of speculative design, to make up a common universe.

This universe of many different objects revolves around a common purpose: that of questioning the conventional view of the future and opening up fissures through which new possibilities can be filtered. How would the world be if the act of suicide became an event as ordinary as a birth? What would happen if a universal basic income became a reality? What would happen if every person received a limited store of emotions to be experienced in the course of a lifetime? These are some of the provocations whispered to us by these objects dispatched to us from every corner of Latin America.

To put together the collection, Paolo Cardini of the Rhode Island Institute of Design (the founder of Global Futures Lab) and Karla Paniagua, director of the department of Design for Tomorrow at CENTRO, organized a series of student workshops in the aim of stimulating research, reflection, and argument about the prevailing discourses regarding the future. The results of these endeavors, initiated in 2018, are presented today, just now unpacked on arrival from the future, in order to generate dialogues of different kinds with the public.

In addition to the objects from the collection of Global Futures Lab, visitors can also enjoy a selection of soundscapes of the future created in the laboratory of the same name under the direction of producer and sound engineer Leonardo Santiago.

As a third act of these dispatches from the future, an invitation was extended to independent artists and designers who use speculative design as a tool for exploration and communication to present some of their own pieces and so establish unexpected connections with the rest of the collection.

The visiting public will notice that included in the credits are the names not only of those who conceived the pieces but also those of the artisans, designers, printers, and other professionals who made possible the actual fabrication of each one of these souvenirs of the future.

We invite you all to welcome these dispatches from the future.