The Future Is Near (in the neighbourhood)

Pop-up exhibition and film screening

Our thoughts turn to the future, with all its hopes and anxieties. How might urban areas look like in an optimistic scenario of the future? What is currently preventing those visions from becoming reality? We attempt to form a holistic impression on the basis of interviews with artists, architects, researchers, urbanists, activists, and others. Drawing on insights from these various conversations, a visualisation of the future neighbourhood unfolds through a video essay. Remarkably, even the most radical ideas of today remain relatively accessible. In fact, they seem within reach, as if we could touch them, and bear a stark contrast to utopian visions of the past century. However, behind this deceptive simplicity lies a gap with reality that is no less significant than that of the ambitious modernist utopias. The escalating climate crisis, the outbreak of new wars in Europe and abroad, and the global rise of far-right political movements are only augmenting this gap. So why is this the case? This is what we aim to clarify in our endeavour.

Natalia Matsenko and Yuri Yefanov took part in our Artist and Research Residency Program from September to October 2025.

Natalia Matsenko is an independent curator, art critic, and lecturer. She focuses on the landscape and environmental transformations, human and nonhuman communities as well as networks, new media, and cultural heritage preservation. Natalia’s practice draws on relations between ecological and political action and art and their short and long-term impacts on the environmental systems. Born in Cherkasy, Ukraine, Matsenko graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts with a master’s degree in Theory and History of Art. In recent years, she curated exhibitions and participated in residencies in Germany, Ukraine, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, and Mexico, among others. Several projects have been made in cooperation with the European External Action Service. She was a fellow curator at Kunstmuseum Bochum, Germany (2022–2024) and recently was in a curatorial residency at Cité internationale des arts, Paris.

Yuri Yefanov is a Ukrainian artist and filmmaker whose work explores the otherworldly digital dimensions of computer-generated imagery. His digital systems and mythologies investigate the interplay between everyday life and politics. Yefanov’s projects have been exhibited at numerous venues including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Genève Centre d’Art Contemporain, and PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, among others. His artistic practice focuses on the future, landscapes, war, and ecology. Using a game engine to generate digital simulations of diverse decentralized societies, he cultivates utopian visions of a distant future of humanity. Originating from Crimea, which was annexed from Ukraine in 2014, the artist frequently incorporates this landscape into his work. Through digital simulations, he reactivates “ghost areas” and restores the connection between the landscape and the collective memory of it.