Presents of the Future

Futuring Overtures - a first impression

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A few weeks ago we arrived in Malta, ready to run our first series of “Futuring activities” within our project Presents of Future, a part of the cultural programme of the Maltese Presidecy of the Council of the European Union 2017 with the support of the Arts Council Malta and the Valletta 2018 Foundation.

These past weeks have kept us busy, excited and challenged in the best sense of the word. The days were filled with pleasant surprises, warm smiles, positive feedback, delicious traditional food and great people to work with. We are happy to have accomplished four "Futuring Overture" sessions during out stay here. The first of many steps; focusing on possible Futures of Europe with unique perspectives of Malta.

We have had the pleasure to meet more than 100 interested people during these sessions, all of them willing to share their ideas, concerns and knowledge with us. What a privilege! It is not often that a group of strangers come together, trusting you from the get-go enough to share their hopes and dreams, fears and concerns.

We’ve had people of all ages, backgrounds and from all four corners of the Islands. Students as well as pensioners, artists, heads of councils, teachers, road-construction workers and many more. Most of them were born in Malta, some of them had been living abroad before returning, others took Malta to be their adoptive home and a few have been tourists, visiting friends over here in Malta and dragged along to participate in the session. Simply put, we’ve had a vast input of thoughts and philosophies.

In preparing for these sessions, we’ve been warned about possibly having trouble dealing with “the Maltese” as they are persuasive, hold strong opinions, “there will be only one way” they said “and it will be their way”. We were told that 5 hours on a Sunday attempting speculative discussions will be a disaster with the Maltese.

But you know what, generalisations suck! Well, we all know that, at least we all pretend we know it, nevertheless recurrently we end up using them and (even worse!) start to believe them. We are happy to say that we didn't meet “the Maltese.” For all the sessions we experienced and enjoyed an interested, concentrated crowd, willing to contribute and to listen. Sure, people can have strong opinions - but we were expecting just that and as far as we can judge, people have been giving space to others. Some of the participants even returned, to invest some more time in shaping questions and concerns for Malta and Europe.

As I write this, we’re filled with dozens of sheets covered in notes, scribbles, questions, responses and imaginations of the things that might be affecting the way that Europe and Malta will develop in the near future.

We will spend the next few days analysing the results from the sessions, preparing it for a display in the Esplora science center which will also include a series of interviews with participants and a documentary of the process. Then slowly we will get ready for the next round of futuring exercises with our partners from Extrapolation Factory, Changeist and FoAM. We look forward to welcoming some familiar faces from the first round and meeting a new bunch of interested and interesting participants in the next rounds.

Images can be found on our Flickr​ account, the documentary will take another few days to finish.