FUTURΛ Seminar

Curatorial Practices for Transformation ✴︎ Reprogramming the Real through Performance & Micro-Revolutions

FUTURΛ is an annual seminar dedicated to critical reflection on curatorship and artistic direction in the performing arts. At a time when artistic leadership roles are becoming increasingly fragile or disappearing, and curatorship is often reduced to temporary and discontinuous formats, FUTURΛ asserts the importance of curatorial thinking as a critical, situated and transformative practice.

From an intersectional feminist perspective, it brings together performing arts professionals to reflect on curatorship as an artistic, political and social practice. Over two days, participants explore methodologies that challenge conventional models, understanding curatorship as an expanded field and a site of negotiation and contestation, while discussing alternative forms of cultural mediation, artistic accompaniment and artistic leadership. The seminar also reflects on curatorship across different geographies and contexts, its possible restarts, and the need to create more hybrid, sustainable and politically engaged formats. Treating decolonisation as an ongoing process of unlearning, it proposes the rebuilding of relations based on interdependence and a rethinking of belonging.

FUTURΛ is, therefore, a space for listening, critical exchange and collective imagination, where multiple perspectives intersect and where thinking about possible futures begins with attending to the present with courage, care and radical openness.

Artistic work as a milieu, festival as a milieu
with Anne Kerzerho & Mawena Yehouessi

23–24 October 2026
materiais adversos weekend
Minde & Alcanena

FUTURΛ is an invitation to reinvent curatorial practices: a peer-to-peer space for imagining possible futures with courage, care, and an openness to what has yet to be named.

A seminar for programmers, artists and cultural practitioners, FUTURΛ offers a space for listening, critical exchange and experimentation, responding to the urgent need to rethink curatorial practice today. From an intersectional feminist perspective, it brings together professionals from the performing arts in a gathering dedicated to curating as an artistic, political and social practice.

During these two-day seminar, we will explore how the convergence of artistic processes, practice-based research and experimental pedagogies fosters a situated and contextualised approach to both artistic and curatorial practices, while inviting a reconfiguration of the relationships between artists, producers and audiences based on solidarity, at a time of renewed totalitarian pressure worldwide, we ask how our practices and networks remain decisive for fostering a collective capacity for radical commonality.

This meeting takes place within the framework of an initiative supported by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the Institut français (PICC), dedicated to strengthening transnational networks of artistic cooperation and to experimenting with more sustainable models of production, circulation and support for contemporary creation.

2026

Anne Kerzerho & Mawena Yehouessi

2025

Silvia Bottiroli & Alessandra Mattana with the participation of Gaya de Medeiros & Piny

Applications and program available soon.