Our future is informed in large part by our history and our present. When we speak of the future, we hope for better things – we think of what we are leaving behind for the next generation and the legacies that we will make an imprint upon. The future is a space infused with a hope for the things that unfortunately, the present does not provide for so many – it is a dream of freedom, security, education, peace, and choices.

So much of what is created by artists today is a direct response to our current socio-political scenarios. In 2015, Sam Thorne, artistic director of Tate St. Ives, UK, and a contributing editor of frieze, invited 10 curators to envision the future of museums 25 years from now. Their responses were varied and telling, ranging from everything addressing ideas around space, commercial viability and technology. According to Abdellah Karroum, Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha,  “Art forms evolve continuously as expression takes shape and adopts the shared languages of the time….Museums in 2040 will continue to serve as living archives and spaces for exploring art and creative expressions from other times and locations. As well as being places of memory, museums also act as arenas in which to think about how our bodies relate to space and time, how we remember the past, our relationship to elsewhere and how we project into the future.”

With this month’s edition of Write | Art | Connect (WAC), we put forth the theme of The Future to allow writers to ruminate upon the things that occupy their thoughts when they envision the future. It was interesting to see the varied responses – addressing so many similar ideas cited above – of space, technology and identity. From an exploration of the ephemerality of Cabral Yard in Kochi as a sustainable art space, to the longevity of the analogue in a digital era; from an examination of the queering of performance spaces to questioning notions of singular national identities in a multi cultural, multi lingual and nuanced global reality, WAC is pleased to present a multitude of futures for the month of August.

The future of the future will still contain the past
Time goes slowly and times goes fast …
The future of the future will still repeat today
Time goes fast and fades away…
The future of the future will still contain tonight
The passage of day the passage of light…

•  “The Future of the Future”, Everything But The Girl

Cover image: “Run Free”, Graffiti in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Image courtesy Nandita Jaishankar