Algae Domebiotechnology
Inside a country building the future it intends to live in — a photographic journey through the clean rooms, reactors and laboratories where the next decade is quietly being engineered.
Luca Locatelli approached the commission as interpretation as much as documentation. The photographs were made inside the laboratories and facilities he was given access to; they look for something quieter than a record — small icons of the prototypes through which the Netherlands is studying its own future, guided by its National Technology Strategy. Their abstraction is intentional: an attempt to let future prototypes register as an idea rather than a catalogue of machines. More than a survey of places, the series is a tentative journey in the future tense — toward where a country is trying to imagine itself in the decades ahead.
Beneath the images runs the National Technology Strategy — the framework with which the Netherlands has named ten key technologies, from photonics and quantum to biotechnology, green chemistry and energy materials, as the ground for its coming decades. Each is turned toward a shared horizon: a world approaching ten billion people, a warming limit to hold, food and clean water to secure, an energy system to remake. Future Prototypes does not set out to promote these answers; it offers a way of seeing the research while it is still underway — an image, rather than an argument, offered to a culture of change.
The work belongs to New Dutch — a movement coordinated by NL Platform, under the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions (NBTC) and a network of cities, regions, campuses and companies. It exists to treat innovation as part of the country’s identity: a thread running from the old necessity of keeping the land dry to present work in quantum, chips, water, food and design — and to connect that work to the global challenges it speaks to. Future Prototypes is one commission within that wider effort.