"The past bites the tail of everything that is to come", Nietzsche remarked with regard to the question of whether the future can be meaningfully perspectivized without reference to the past. But how can future perspectives and scenarios emerge that, due to their historical conditionality, are also sufficiently open to new things and open up imaginative horizons that go beyond the boundaries of familiar perspectives, habits and the expectations, fears and hopes that are fed by them?
The future needs origins...
Since its foundation in 2020, the Uri Institute Cultures of the Alps has dedicated itself to the task of systematically capturing, describing and analyzing the historical resonance spaces and current development dynamics in the "Alps" cultural area and discussing and communicating them in an overall context. In doing so, cultural, humanities and social science approaches are brought together in an interdisciplinary approach and transferred via transdisciplinary interfaces to non-academic practice and its various representatives in society, business and politics.
...and origin needs a future
This expertise is increasingly being used to develop a "literacy" that makes it possible to recognize, describe and implement potentials for shaping the future in the context of historical and present-related information. On the one hand, it is about recognizing and exploring contingencies in established habits of perception and interpretation. In this way, the rich reservoir of past experiences and the perspectives and skills gained from them become a resonance chamber for imagining and shaping the future. On the other hand, we focus on the blind spots and opportunities that were neither considered nor realized in the past. For this reason, a space for thought was created at the Uri Institute in spring 2024 with the transversal topic of Alpine Futures Literacy, which is systematically established in interaction with the respective research, mediation and advisory activities.