When Culture Meets Societal Transformation: on Cultural Practices as Techniques of Futuring

A provocative way of looking at our inability to cope with societal problems today is to see them as part of a 'crisis of the imagination' (cf. Buell, 1996; Castoriadis 2007; Ghosh 2016). This particular way of looking at complex problems calls attention to our collective capacity to comprehend problems and to foresee possible solution pathways. In this paper we argue for a closer attention to cultural practices as sites for imagining alternative futures. The predominant idea that ‘culture’ is domain separated from politics overlooks the unique contribution that exhibitions, performative arts and theater may make to fostering societal change. In this paper we define cultural practices as a particular set of techniques of futuring that combine immersive techniques, collective experiences and other unique possibilities for engagement that are often absent or less prominent in dominant political practices. Empirically, we draw on historic insights into cultural expressions in the making of socio-political movements in the 1960s and 1970s in the Netherlands and a recent experience with the exhibition ‘Places of Hope’ on the future of the Netherlands, in which both authors were involved as respectively curator and curator-assistant.