Although the future is still absent, we constantly anticipate its arrival, making the not-yet and what may be a part of the present. We cherish dreams and ambitions, look for opportunities and calculate risks, we ponder the consequences of our choices for our lives’ course, and construct hopes on the basis of certainties provided by relations of trust.

In addition, collectively we project economic prognoses, weather forecasts, insurances, contracts, urban planning, financial speculation, utopian visions, apocalyptic dystopias, narratives of progress and historical purpose, or science-fiction scenarios.

As some social theorists note, we live in liquid times of flexible contracts and loose social bonds, as well as in a reflexive risk society, in which modernity is confronted with its own consequences, such as the polluting effects and environmental risks that spring from industrial capitalism. In order to tame these unfortunate or outright apocalyptic effects, we surrender to technocratic expert systems.

On the other hand, the existential uncertainty posed by the open-endedness of the future seems to be of all times and places. Everywhere people look for omens of good fortune or fateful catastrophes, imagine, predict, and speculate. This screening program seeks to show different figurations of ways in which we are directed towards the openness of the future as a manifold of maybes.