People in the snow

Background

Future needs origin - origin needs future

“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 fed by them?

Landslides, mountain alignments and central valleys

This question is also central to the debate on the future of the Alpine region. It is not only the existential challenges of the present, such as climate change, that manifest themselves here in a particularly drastic and vivid form. Demographic change and the tendency of the younger generation to “flee the mountains” to urban or infrastructurally well-developed, peri-urban conurbations or “center valleys ”i (Müller-Jentsch) are also leading to a striking structural change and to problems that require specific solutions in view of the specific geomorphological conditions. These are just two examples that sharpen the necessary focus on the “future” in Alpine regions.

Stereotypes and horizons of imagination

One particular feature should not be ignored here: at the latest since the “discovery” of the Alps as a motif of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, they have become the imaginary counter-concept to an increasingly urban, bourgeois and industrialized society. The stereotypes created in this process continue to have an effect today and focus on the question of what characterizes Alpine landscapes and ways of life - in short, “the Alps” - and how they should continue to be characterized in the future. Therefore, the intensified staging of the Alps as a space of longing and counter-space in the 19th century is decisive in the formation of future perspectives for the Alpine region.

Resonance chambers and world resistances

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.

Contingencies as potentials

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, in spring 2024, a space for thought was created at the Uri Institute with the transversal topic of Alpine Futures Literacy, which is systematically established in interaction with the respective research, mediation and advisory activities.

Speculating in scenarios

The concept of “futures literacy”, which originates from futurology, is playing an increasingly prominent role in UNESCO's activities in particular. “Futures literacy” refers to ”the ability that enables people to better understand the role of the future in their vision and actions. Futures literacy stimulates the imagination and improves our ability to prepare for, recover from and invent change.” (UNESCOii) The understanding of Alpine Futures Literacy at the Institute Cultures of the Alps is based on the UNESCO approach, but goes beyond it: Alpine Futures Literacy incorporates the “correspondence” with the past and present described above as an essential element of the program and confronts the imagination for the future with the substance of the past and the urgencies of the present. The aim is to practice futures literacy as an organic interaction between historical path dependencies, transdisciplinary expertise and explorative imagination. Last but not least, the inclusion of artistic ways of thinking and procedures plays a role in this, as they can contribute essential impulses for a critical examination of the limitations of the imagination through stereotypes and the transformative potential of aesthetic practices.

Incubator for future germs

The “Alpine Futures Literacy” work area builds on the Institute's established research focuses and ongoing projects and specifically taps into them as a resource for “future seeds”.iii Research projects that deal with the history of the expansion of renewable energies in the Alpine region, for example, are used as a multi-perspective archive for the perspective-oriented examination of concepts of a future aesthetic of Alpine energy cultural landscapes, which in turn involves expertise from the field of artistic research and the stakeholders of “implementation”. Projects that deal with the history of skiing become sources of inspiration for work on the question of what the future of winter sports could look like in the context of climate change - and what needs and challenges arise here not only with regard to economic alternatives, but also with regard to the cultural self-image of the population in regions characterized by winter tourism. And, as a further example, projects dealing with demographic change and emigration in the Alpine region will become the transdisciplinary condensed knowledge foundation for a debate on the potential transformative effects of digitalization, specifically using the example of “digital nomads” as the “new highlanders” and co-creators of a future Alpine socio-economy.

Agility as a program

The “Alpine Futures Literacy” work area is designed as a future laboratory that is dynamically formed from changing, topic-specific project contexts (“pop-up labs”). The impetus for setting up such labs can come from the Institute's research and educational activities as well as from outside. The management of the work area is designed as a curatorial function in which both content-related and functional intersections between the individual subject areas are created and moderated. A central concern here is to create productive links and “short circuits” between the research, mediation and consulting carried out at and by the Institute by bringing the knowledge cultures, people and the non-academic public gathered at the Institute into a fruitful interplay.

Contact person

The work area “Alpine Futures Literacy” is curated by Jens Badura and Boris Previšić, contact person is Jens Badura (jens.badura@unilu.ch).

 

i See the study by Daniel Müller-Jentsch: www.avenir-suisse.ch/publication/zentrumstaeler/
iiwww.unesco.org/en/futures-literacy/about
iii “Future germs” are impulses of possibility that are hidden, and sometimes concealed, in the common findings of reality and in the regimes of perception and relevance that shape them. They are potentialities that, under appropriate conditions, allow new perspectives to emerge from what is supposedly known, familiar or taken for granted: conditions under which a counterfactual testing of unfamiliar ways of perceiving, contextualizing and/or negotiating the respective facts or thematic field can take place in the explorative interplay between facticity and fiction - sometimes also in the sense of active “delearning” with a view to describing and interpreting a fact.