In 1975, NASA commissioned a series of illustrations about space colonies from Rick Guidance. The idea was not so much to imagine a realistic future, but to make the American electorate dream of a possible future. And it would only be possible if they got more government funding. US President Richard Nixon had promised to cut investment, shelving the space race. Imagining a future can impact our present, or so NASA thought. In the end, the Guidance drawings didn’t change much. The space agency saw its budget reduced and did not return to the Moon, much less to build space colonies. But these penetrated the collective imagination. Today Guidance illustrations are science fiction icons. They served as inspiration for recent films such as Interstellarby Christopher Nolan. We continue dreaming of a future that could have been, but never came.
Can the future be predicted? Is it an exercise in divination or preparation for possible scenarios? If the future arrived yesterday, what awaits us tomorrow? These are the questions that have been raised in the Retina SQL event. Presented by Jaime García Cantero, director of Retina, the event had the highest institutional representation, with Yolanda Díaz, Vice President and Minister of Labor, Raquel Sánchez Jiménez, Minister of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, and Teresa Riesgo, Secretary General of Innovation. The business world also had a presence. First, by the companies promoting the event: Santander and Telefónica, and their annual partners: Accenture, Cepsa, PMI and Servicenow.
We are at a crossroads, a turning point before which a multitude of possible futures are opening up. And it is necessary to confront them all. “The future is that something better to achieve. That is the objective we have today, so we are going to forget about technological determinisms and dystopias, ”García Cantero began. With this maxim in mind, he began to give way to a staff of experts in different fields to confront ideas. Future scenarios were debated but the aim was to understand present dilemmas. What is the future of culture and art? How important is citizenship in cities that are increasingly saturated and impersonal? Retina has brought together thinkers from all disciplines to debate, from antagonistic or simply divergent points of view, about the futures that await us in these three fields.
Citizenship and the common good
What will the city of the future be like? It is not known for sure, but what is certain is that almost everyone will be in it. 88% of Spaniards will live in large cities within 30 years. This is what the Spain 2050 Plan ensures, which served as the common thread of this first panel. Raquel Sánchez, Minister of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, began by reeling off the challenges that this can pose. And putting these figures in context, since the current situation already tends towards urban concentration. “In Spain, 20% of the territory concentrates 80% of the population. It is a demographic challenge, because in front of that densely populated Spain we find territories and provinces that are facing their extinction ”, said the minister. For a future challenge, sometimes formulas from the past have to be recovered. “We must once again recover the model of Mediterranean cities, compact, dense, with well-thought-out facilities,” he claimed. “It is a model that was broken by the liberalization of the land, by the real estate bubble. And it began to produce very different neighborhoods: some with lower densities, in which there was a very significant dependence on private vehicles. And on the other hand, in urban environments, the degradation of neighborhoods that concentrated the most disadvantaged groups ”. The creation of more homogeneous urban cities, defended the minister, could result in them being less socially unequal.
Spain faces specific challenges, but its situation is framed within a global problem. A good account of this was given by the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, Pritzker Architecture Prize winner in 2016 and chosen by The New York Times as one of the 26 creative geniuses of that same year. Aravena defended the concept of “porous urbanism”, a model in which the job of the urban planner is to lay the foundations on which citizens must build the city. “You have to create open systems that allow channeling the presence of people. Understand urban planning not as something that is delivered finished. When one finishes the design process is when the colonization process by people begins ”.
Political scientist Víctor Lapuente is the author of Decalogue of the good citizen, a book that the same in 30 years does not make sense. “It would have to be rewritten,” Lapuente conceded. “If an event like this had been called in the 1970s, the experts would have come to the conclusion that the worst nightmares of humanity, in pollution, in violence, etc., would be fulfilled in the great cities of our time. And it has not been like that ”. Ideas regenerate, he noted, and it is very difficult to predict where we are going. Lapuente does not believe that the main problem of future urban planning is the city itself, but its relationship with the rural environment. “The gap between the increasingly wealthy cities and the rest of the country, the regions that don’t matter, is what is behind most of the world’s populist movements.” Lapuente also vindicated the gender perspective applied to urban planning, pointing it out as “the great forgotten in the city.” The political scientist developed the idea that he already enunciated in a recent column, relating the way in which countries treat women with their prosperity.
Identity
What role will identity have in a future as liquid and heterogeneous as the one ahead? How has our relationship with screens changed our idea of ourselves? Identity is a diffuse concept that can be applied to different aspects of our life. It can refer to gender, politics, ideals or hobbies that define us. To something as subjective as who we are or who we want to be. How we tell ourselves and others. Elizabeth Duval is a writer, philosopher, and activist. He faced identity by connecting it with the speech of his latest book, After the trans. Joan Tardá, political historian from Esquerra Republicana, started by claiming that concepts such as identity and sovereignty should always be combined in the plural.
“In the construction of gender identity the internet or things as basic as video games can influence,” Duval started. “On The Sims, the fact that you have a character editor, which allows you to choose what your face is like, what your body is like, what your existence is like … I think that is interesting. See, not only how your identity is shaped, but also your own image of that identity ”. Starting from this premise, the philosopher projected these elements to reach disturbing conclusions. The filters of Instagram and other social networks, the modified image that the screens give of us, can end up influencing the one we want to project in the real world. “To the point that there are women who go to a surgeon asking to be more like the image that a certain filter gives of themselves.”
He also analyzed the controversy of the last video clip of C. Tangana, in which he participates. The video has roused part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, by including dance scenes inside the Cathedral of Toledo, generating a debate in which the identity issue and social networks are very present. “I have to say that not all Catholics have been offended. There has been a schism, perhaps from a video of C. Tangana, a new reform and counter-reform emerges, ”he ironized.
Joan Tardá, member of the National Council of Republican Esquerra of Catalonia, pointed out the binary nature of the identity question. “I think that identity, identities, are inherited. But at the same time identities are constructed and from this construction a fight is generated for the legitimation of identities. And this is an engine of history, how one is able to fit the inheritance received ”. Tardá understands that in postmodern societies, more liquid than previous ones, there is room for greater respect for different identities. “Religion became independent from the state, or the state from religion. National identity can be independent of the State, although I do not know if it is convenient. If there should be official languages or not, if the concept of nationality makes sense today ”. In any case, Tardá believes that identities can be a catalyst for progress, “and what was seen as a danger can become a factor for progress.”
Culture
“Good art is that which transforms the way we see the world”, begins the artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, in her introductory video of the third and last block. His speech served as a guide for the conversation between Niño de Elche, musician, and Ángeles González-Sinde, scriptwriter and president of the Board of Trustees of the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. The presenter began by highlighting the condition of “ex” of both. In the first case, ex flamenco (Niño de Elche has mutated towards a more experimental music in his latest works) and in the second, ex-minister of culture.
“An important issue is the distinction between culture and entertainment,” González-Sinde started. “I think that the pandemic has launched us into an absorption of culture through the screens and that has left some winners and some losers. We have replaced the large cultural multinationals with the large technology multinationals ”. Entertainment is based on the use of data and money to create content while culture, defends the former minister, is born from the intimacy of the artist. “That is why it needs economic protection, resources, but also society, which is determined to protect its creation.”
Niño de Elche could fit into that type of freer artist, but he also has great successes behind him. His work combines success (collaborations with the aforementioned C. Tangana) with the most experimental, such as his installation at the Museo Reina Sofía. The artist fuses low and high culture in his work, the hallmark of the contemporary scene. “The dividing lines are not clear to us,” the artist acknowledged, “and I think that blurring these lines is a positive thing, although cracks are created.” Create new realities, propose new things and provoke. These are some of the ideas that can be seen in the work of Niño de Elche, although he does not believe that this commitment is something exclusive to the artistic world. He defends that in the future critical consciousness should be transversal to all professions. “It’s a way of looking at the world you live in,” he says. “And the one in which you will live.”
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