Studio Superflux
ONE WEEK ABOUT Education by curator Open Set 2015
Workshop: Port Fiction
3-5 August 2015
Location: V2_Institute
Assignment
“Cities are, in many senses, the crucibles of our global future. Rotterdam embarks on becoming a global city with a thriving economy and large-scale ambitious infrastructure projects. In this workshop participants will explore the port of Rotterdam, its operational, economic, cultural and political impact on the city – historically, today, and in the future. We will investigate how these forces will shape and influence the city, its geopolitics, its economy and its people.
The participants become agents or sleuths, observing and recording their findings in photographs, texts, drawings and videos. They will work through a series of foresight and futurescaping exercises to map out interconnections between their observations and wider trends, weak signals, unforeseen events, and uncertainties. The participants will imagine new, alternate, mutant versions of the Rotterdam port, and/or its visible and invisible infrastructures.”
Results
The invitation of the workshop was to imagine and explore possible future scenarios of the port of Rotterdam using a tool of visual story telling for creating narratives that engage people, rather than just leave them being informed, and allow them to position themselves and form an opinion. The stories, presented as group projects, confronted the audience with the geopolitical, economical and ecological issues of the port in a possible future, although all had an existing real starting point in the present, highlighted by media or researchers. The future port was depicted among others as a touristic attraction, shelter for immigrants, and as a center for the bio industry.