Untameable Futures

Aleksandra Wruk is a certified eco-somatic facilitator, educator, movement and sound artist, and regenerative well-being advocate with experience delivering workshops on nervous system regulation, embodied awareness, and nature-based practice. They create accessible, grounded, trauma-aware spaces that support deep nervous system repair and practical integration.

Aleksandra holds a PhD in Mental Well-being from the University of Glasgow and is also trained in trauma-informed coaching, somatic inquiry, restorative yoga, meditation, and sound therapy. Their background in experience design and research informs a practice attentive to how people sense, move, and inhabit their bodies.

Website: www.aleksandra‑wruk.online

Alexander Damianos is a lecturer and researcher in environmental law at the University of Kent. He is a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, where he founded and convenes the Law and Environmental Humanities Network.

He is the author of Science, Politics and the Anthropocene Working Group: What was the Anthropocene? (Routledge, 2025), which presents the first and only ethnographic study of the effort to formalise the Anthropocene as a geological fact. His work has been published in journals including Law & Critique; Global Sustainability; Theory, Culture & Society; and Social Studies of Science.

Ecological Translations website: www.ecologicaltranslation.com

André Silva is a filmmaker, animator, educator, and Associate Professor of Film Production at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (USA). His work explores relationships between ecology, perception, consciousness, and the more-than-human world through environmental documentary, essay film, animation, and experimental media.

Alongside his creative practice, he develops Expanded Environmentalism, an ongoing interdisciplinary framework connecting environmental experience, creative practice, and pedagogy.

Website: www.andresilvaspace.com

Aude Bertrand-Höttcke is a lecturer and action researcher at WittenLab, a transdisciplinary FuturesLab offering explorative seminars and workshops for students and persons from civil society at Witten/Herdecke university, Germany.

She operates at a crossroads between urban forms of life, contemporary cultures and futures studies. Her projects are often informed by immersive, contemporary artistic practices—especially media/net art and socially engaged/community-based art.

Beáta Pintérné Sosity is a designer, doctoral researcher, and university lecturer at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) in Budapest. Her research explores the intersections of disability, design, and social justice, with a particular focus on disability as a generative force for reimagining design and alternative futures.

She is the co-founder of CTRL+ALT+CRIP Magazine, a cultural platform amplifying disabled voices in art, design, and public discourse.

After graduating from ecological studies, Céline Hough pursued her learning through regenerative practices, starting with urban restoration (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris Saclay, Ecole du Breuil). She then learned and experimented in agricultural fields, forestry and riverscapes.

She has been managing natural and cultural sites for the past 6 years in the South West of France, and is currently working at La Maison Forte. Regenerative hydrology has been the heart of Céline’s practice since she started managing ecological sites in 2020. Beaver mimicry was introduced into her life in 2024, through the teaching of Kate Linquist, Kevin Swift, Suzanne Husky, Baptiste Morizot, Clément Délis and others.

Daniel Kaplan is a futurist and social entrepreneur, with one leg in action, and another in imagination. In 2000, he created the Next-Generation Internet Foundation (Fing), a think-&-do-tank to ‘anticipate digital transformations’. In 2018, he co-founded the Plurality University Network.

Dominika Kolenda is an artist and interdisciplinary researcher working across environmental and medical humanities, philosophy, ethnography, and bioart. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the University of Oxford and is currently pursuing Master’s degrees in Interdisciplinary Studies and Ethnology at the University of Gdańsk.

Her work explores more-than-human relations through speculative methodologies, artistic practice, and ethnographic inquiry.

Website: dominikakolenda.com

François Taddei, co-founder and president of the Learning Planet Institute, is an internationally renowned researcher. Convinced that the future of learning must be co-constructed with learners, he explores educational transitions and ‘planetizenship’—learning to care for oneself, others and the planet.

He advocates large-scale collaboration to co-build—with all stakeholders, from young people to UNESCO and the United Nations University (UNU)—a Learning Planet Academy, powered by technology and grounded in interdisciplinary sciences.

His goal is not to train the best students in the world, but the best students for the world—by strengthening their agency and their ability to care for global commons and to become ‘the change they wish to see in the world.’

Jayasri Sridhar is a designer, filmmaker, classical musician and writer from India whose practice engages with social, ecological, decolonial and more-than-human themes. A graduate of the National Institute of Design Ahmedabad and student of Central Saint Martins London, she brings an interdisciplinary, plurality-inspired approach to her work with communities, spaces, organisations, archives and speculative narratives.

Her projects often span the areas of social innovation, cultural production, forest restoration and biodiversity conservation, and have appeared across international conferences, publications, and festivals. Jayasri loves initiating collaborations with people from around the world, and is presently building her own studio.

Website: jayasrisridhar.com

Joffrey Lavigne est doctorant au sein du Centre d’Ecologie et des Sciences de la Conservation (MNHN/CNRS/SU). Son travail porte sur les imaginaires de la renaturation en milieu urbain.

Il co-pilote par ailleurs le programme de recherche création Fictions d’Anticipation pour la Renaturation (FAR), financé dans le cadre du programme ERABLE sur la mise en récit de la biodiversité.

Juan Camilo Alfonso—aka Fonso—is a Colombian visual artist. His practice has expanded during the last 15 years from mural painting and printing techniques to participatory projects, performances and textile installations in public space. Based on the understanding of historical memory as a means to rebuild broken social fabrics, his projects call for social interactions to support reconciliation processes in different contexts such as urban and rural Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Western Sahara, the Mexico–US Border, Germany, and France.

In 2019, he graduated with honours from the Master’s programme Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts—UdK Berlin. He has worked for more than fifteen years as a pedagogue in Germany, Colombia and different countries in Latin America.

Currently he is part of the working group of the station urbaner kulturen of the nGbK in Hellersdorf, a member of the MAL Crew in Colombia, co-founder of ilali Studio, an artistic collective studio in Berlin, and lastly the founder of the Red KunstCol, a network of Colombian artist and cultural workers in Germany.

Website: www.juancamiloalfonso.com

Ketty Steward est l’autrice d’une centaine de nouvelles publiées depuis 2003. Elle signe également des romans, essais et poèmes, souvent expérimentaux.

Présidente du Réseau Université de la Pluralité qui s’intéresse aux imaginaires alternatifs du futur, elle écrit et fait écrire, principalement, des textes fantastiques et de science-fiction. Docteure en psychologie et psychologue clinicienne, elle travaille sur la place du récit dans le soin et dans les processus de changement.

Site web : https://ktsteward.net

Kitti Baracsi is a Creative Learning Specialist. She works at the intersection of art, critical pedagogy and urban research, curating community initiatives and collective multimodal artistic creations, with a focus on urban inequalities, collective practices and rethinking knowledge production. She has a background in Communication Science, Aesthetics and Pedagogy.

Born in Hungary, based in Lisbon, she collaborates with movements, schools, associations, cultural institutions and universities across Europe and occasionally in Latin-America. She is a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at LSE Inequalities and Associated Researcher at Center for Research in Anthropology at ISCTE-IUL and currently Regional Fellow for Europe at Global Artivism.

She is co-founder and member of several collectives in Lisbon and internationally. Her initiative periferias dibujadas investigates urban transformations and conflicts, and creates spaces where children, young people and intergenerational groups can research, narrate and intervene in their context through art and collective learning.

Website: linktr.ee/kittibaracsi

Lena Karson is an artist-researcher, cultural mediator, educator, and performer. Her practice centers on creating artistic and participatory tools or performances that encourage groups to re-examine the nature of encounters. Through the lens of conflict and misunderstanding, she explores how systemic dynamics shape our collective ways of being and knowing.

Graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2018), she is also a trained conflict mediator and holds a master’s degree from Eur-Artec (2024), specializing in art as research. Currently, she leads conflict training sessions, performs with the Choeur Sirene Song, and conducts ‘Le Laboratoire des conflictualités’, an art and research project at La Maison de la Conversation in Paris.

Website: www.lenakarson.com

Mali Weil is an artistic platform established by Elisa Di Liberato, Lorenzo Facchinelli, and Mara Ferrieri, based in Trento, Italy. Through an expanded practice that blends art with fiction, philosophy, and science, Mali Weil investigates the spaces and forms of political imagination. Since 2022, her research has centred on the creation of a speculative world around the concept of ‘interspecies diplomacies’.

Mali Weil’s visual production originates in performance and expands into film, speculative design, textile works, and editorial projects. Its practice also encompasses curatorial projects and workshops, as participatory platforms for discussion and unlearning.

She authored The Shining Reverie of Unruly Objects (2020), on the relationships between objects, narratives, and performance, and The Mountain of Advanced Dreams (2024), which critically explores the concept of interspecies diplomacies.

Website: maliweil.org

Melanie Cieslinski is a speculative designer and futurist whose methodology is informed by her studies in Design and Digital Transformation in Germany and the Netherlands. She specializes in the critical evaluation of the impact of technological systems on the human and non-human body.

The German Design Council recognized her practice in 2025 by nominating her for the prestigious ‘Newcomer of the Year 2026’ award. Recently she has been working for an NGO in Terrassa (Barcelona, Spain), where she researched how speculative design can support local cultural initiatives.

Website: cieslinski.framer.website

Nicolas Gluzman conseille les entreprises sur les enjeux RH, de rémunération et d’évolution des métiers depuis plus de quinze ans, fort de son expérience chez Korn Ferry, Nespresso et Richemont. Aujourd’hui, il consacre une part croissante de son activité au futur du travail, et plus particulièrement à l’exploration des évolutions futures des métiers. Il enseigne la prospective à emlyon business school et dans des universités suisses.

Fondateur de Work from the Future et de Futurs Proches, et membre du conseil d’administration du Réseau Université de la Pluralité, il accompagne les organisations publiques et privées dans leur réflexion sur le futur et la conception de modèles adaptés aux mutations du monde à venir, afin de leur permettre de prendre des décisions plus éclairées dès aujourd’hui.

Site : workfromthefuture.com

Noam Youngrak Son is a theorist of material culture, science-fiction writer, and cultural worker based in Brussels. Trained in design, they now develop speculative narratives and theoretical frameworks concerned with technics, ecology, gender, political economy, and the conditions of cultural production.

Son critically examines the politics of representation and asks how human and nonhuman bodies, infrastructures, and systems of value are organized through material and representational regimes. For Son, science fiction is a materialist method for approaching the not-yet: forms of life already latent in the present but not yet available to existing regimes of representation.

They publish the Archive of Patchy Studies as an experiment in how creative labor—namely artmaking and writing—can sustain its value without institutional mediation. As a cultural worker, they co-organize the Queer Collective Workers’ Union in response to the enclosure of queer commons within and around cultural collectives.

Website: www.d‑act.org

Polina Filippova is a visual artist, illustrator, film maker, twin, and design researcher from Saint Petersburg. With a background in academic drawing and painting, she left home to pursue a degree in design in the Netherlands, where she developed a fascination with mixed-media illustration and experimental techniques to animation.

She continued her artistic journey by making animated films, participating in a number of volunteer programs focused on cultural integration, sustainability, and animal welfare.

After relocating to Spain, she earned a master’s degree in Design Research, graduating with a thesis project exploring the concept of interdependence between humans, nonhumans, and technology.

Rocio Berenguer is an author and artistic director. She creates prospective narratives, questioning imaginaries of the future, primarily focusing on the themes of technology and ecology. For each new work, Rocio Berenguer begins by conducting research with scientists, generating a text that she then combines with other materials, including theater, dance, videos, and digital art. Her creations predominantly take the form of interactive installations and shows. Since 2013, she has collaborated on several art and science projects related to interactive devices, language models, robots, and chatbots.

Website: rocioberenguer.com

Rose Rondelez is a designer and futurist committed to addressing contemporary social and climate issues. Her experience in a wide range of fields led her to develop a framework for reflecting on the use of imagination, narratives, and visions of the future. She currently works as a project manager for the Plurality University Network.

Ruthanna Emrys is a cognitive psychologist and science fiction writer, and the judging lead for the Democratic Futures category of the 2026 Protopian Prize. She is the author of A Half-Built Garden, a solarpunk novel about crowdsourced decision-making, watershed management, and arguing with aliens. She lives in a labyrinthine apartment in the Netherlands with her wife and their large, strange family.

Websites: www.ruthannaemrys.com · www.tikanuconsulting.com

Arbocurists is a collaborative creative design and technologist group based in New York City and composed of shuang cai, Ruichao Jiang, Lu Lyu, Fanyi Pan, and Yan Chen.

ma3aber/معابر is a one-person collective (until proven otherwise), a filmmaker who does everything except make films, part cultural organizer/part art-maker. ma3aber/crossings is an open invitation to gather, to create collective artworks where we read and write, walk and talk, install and dismantle, and to struggle for and against the limits of our political imaginary—to radically broaden our field of possibility—to dare to grasp a better world.

In the past they’ve run a fruity film festival, created a free streaming platform and a regional network of community cinemas, and helped uplift local cultural institutions. Yet, their greatest work so far remains the notes app on their phone.

Suzette Brooks Masters is a social entrepreneur, philanthropic advisor, thought leader and strategist on democracy and futures. In addition to advising the Protopian Fiction Prize, she is a Senior Fellow at Democracy Funders Network, US Advisor to the School of International Futures, and co-chair of the Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance.

She holds degrees from Harvard Law School, Cambridge University on a Marshall Scholarship, and Amherst College.

Theun Karelse is an artist and researcher based in Amsterdam. He grew up in a small village in Zeeland, in a family where the arts and sciences felt like two sides of the same thing. After studying fine arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, he joined FoAM, a European network of transdisciplinary labs.

Concerning his practice, he is Speaker for the Living at Zoop Creative Coding and Zoop Amstelpark. He also undertakes fieldwork for the Embassy of the Northsea. Finally, he is representing the Schelde River (l’Escauld) at the Confluence of Waterbodies in Berlin.

Website: heunkarelse.net

Ulrike Schmitz is a multimedia artist based in Berlin. She has a Master of Arts from the Berlin University of the Arts (Institute Art in Context) with a focus on science-related image production. Previously, she studied photography at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie Berlin and participated in the ISSP International Masterclass in Latvia and Portugal. She also completed her studies in law and holds a PhD.

I am interested in biological phenomena and how we perceive, classify and create them. My works explore organic life in the context of science (fiction), biotechnology and biopolitics.

My artistic practice centres on the question of whether we might come to understand the non-human through other means—through the semiotics of life. Do biological systems generate sign structures that precede human language? Are there forms of signaling, response, and exchange that operate across species boundaries? And if so, what prevents us from recognizing them as communication? What prevents us from granting them a voice in politics and legislation?

Website: www.ulrike‑schmitz.com

Victória Oliveira is a Foresight Strategist and Creator of the Purpose Scanning Workshop, specializing in cultural and systemic futures. She helps organizations decode change through research, education, workshops, and strategic advisory, turning emerging signals into opportunities for innovation, resilience, and more plural and equitable futures.

Her work explores the intersection of culture, systems, and emerging behaviors, with a focus on helping organizations build future-ready capabilities in an increasingly complex world.

Websites: purposescanning.com · victoriaoliveira.xyz

Wu Siou Ming is a Kaohsiung-based sound artist whose practice spans sound installation, digital video, and electronic music. His site-specific works delve into the intersection of phenomenology and urban transformation, addressing critical social issues such as economic justice, youth activism, and environmental sustainability.

Website: wusiouming.vercel.app

Yuting Jiang is the co-founder and CEO of Agora Citizen Network, an open-source collective intelligence tool that helps people map opinions and build consensus on complex issues. Agora has been used by institutions like UNESCO and peacebuilding NGOs such as Search for Common Ground.