Future Studies has Won the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2020

“Future Studies” is a long-term project, that is specifically aimed at exploring new ways for humanity to survive on planet Earth. I question our concept of the need for permanent economic growth, and uses this project to open up an intense debate about our relationship to nature and technology.
Fear for the future and scepticism concerning progress have today become more topical than ever. The series “Future Studies” focuses on these, very current, burning questions. My aim through this project is to present the viewer with a debate regarding our concept of growth and our relationship with nature and technology. For a long time, technological progress has represented the foundation upon which utopian visions of the future were built; it has allowed us to have access to an extraordinary number of products and to a comfort unimaginable to previous generations.Today, however, as never before, we are also becoming conscious of its dark side; of the damage it caused in the past, as well as the risks implied in living in a highly technological world.
One of the most characteristic symptoms of the time in which we live is the growing sense of loss of a better future; of a hypothetical tomorrow, perceived as something promising and yet unknown.
Growing political and economic instability, together with an ever more tangible ecological crisis and the virus outbreak experience we are living through, all over the world, are trapping us in an eternal present made of anxiety and pessimism.