by Adela Lovric // June 23, 2025
At the Museum Giersch of Goethe University (MGGU) in Frankfurt am Main, the group exhibition ‘Fixing Futures. Planetary Futures between Speculation and Control’ gathers clashing, converging and contesting visions of tomorrow. Partnering with the graduate school Fixing Futures and the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) of the Goethe University Frankfurt, the museum presents 15 artistic positions alongside scientific perspectives. With a participatory framework, the show invites the public to intervene with their own ideas and jolts of optimism against the threefold planetary crisis: of increasing global warming, loss of biodiversity and environmental pollution.
Dialectical and solution-oriented, ‘Fixing Futures’ marks the start of MGGU’s transformation into a multidisciplinary forum for addressing scientific and socio-political questions. Co-curated by Ina Neddermeyer and Laura Domes, the exhibition sets out with the premise that art—fueled by unruly imagination and radical world-building efforts—can stretch the limits of what we believe is possible and spark genuine transformation. At its core, the show tackles climate crisis as one of the most complex, politically charged, existential issues of our time. It probes “aspirations to determine the future and analyze the relationship between the opposing poles of radical uncertainty and ambitions of control,” as Neddermeyer notes, emphasizing that “dealing with futures is necessarily a political project”—one that reflects power relations and the possibilities for reshaping them.
Baltic Raw Org: ‘Ark,’ 2025, Installation view, MGGU // © Baltic Raw Org, Photo by Esra Klein
The exhibition unfurls across the museum, claiming all areas of the building—including the kitchen as a rest stop, library as a space for reflection and balconies that bloom with pollinator-friendly plants. In the garden, a walk-in wooden ark by artist duo Baltic Raw Org anchors the interactive game ‘ARAPOLIS’ (2024) located inside. The artwork transports visitors to the year 2055, imagining a world reshaped by climate collapse. Through gameplay, participants navigate choices and create future climate scenarios that determine whether they gain access to the ark that is set to depart to Manafi—a fictional, affluent, biophilic city in the South, sealed off from the environmentally devastated North.
Similarly, the two-channel video installation ‘Metakosmia’ (2024) by Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani envisions a near future in which life outside the vast glass enclosure of Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert has become impossible. Within this artificial, self-contained habitat, a lone girl survives alongside plants and insects, narrated from the perspective of an ant. Though fictionalized, the scenario draws from reality: the original Biosphere 2 experiment, launched in 1991, involved four artists and four scientists living in isolation for two years to test the viability of life in closed ecosystems—an early model for potential habitation on the Moon or Mars. Today, the site serves as a climate research facility operated by the University of Arizona, studying environmental resilience in an age of accelerating ecological collapse.
Exhibition view, ‘Fixing Futures’ at MGGU, 2025 // Photo by Esra Klein
Elsewhere in the exhibition, visions of decolonial futures underscore the unequal weight of the climate crisis and the legacy of colonialism in shaping who bears its burdens. In ‘IWAPO – Cities Reimagined’ (2023), Jordan Rita Seruya Awori uses AI to generate speculative versions of global cities, starting with her hometown, Nairobi, reimagined as if colonization had never occurred. The work extends to alternate realities of cities like Paris, London and Tokyo, each transformed under hypothetical colonizers, from Bavaria to Africa. As Awori points out, biases embedded in the AI tool Midjourney quickly became apparent: Nairobi appeared worse off without British rule, Frankfurt under Bantu influence looked degraded, while a French-colonized version of the same city seemingly thrived. These disparities expose how colonial hierarchies persist in the visual logic of AI, embedded in the datasets that shape it. In addition to the collaged, postcard-like cityscapes scattered across black-painted walls, Awori presents ‘KAZURI – Language Reimagined’ (2025), a new sound piece created in collaboration with ChatGPT that imagines a new nation and language drawn from Swahili, English and German.
Libby Heaney: ‘Q is for Climate (?),’ 2023, Installation view, NXT Museum Amsterdam // Courtesy of NXT Museum
Many of the works on view demonstrate the inevitability of reliance on advanced technologies in making and controlling futures. More than any other tool or yet untapped technological promise, quantum technology is seen as a potential paradigm-shifter. In her 2023 video work ‘Q is for Climate (?),’ Libby Heaney explores whether quantum computing might offer a way out of the climate crisis, or accelerate its worst tendencies. Using a quantum code she developed herself, Heaney generated 32 superimposed layers of imagery: simulations of landscapes, quantum machines and a tentacled creature haunt the screen, inviting us to consider alternative ways of sensing and understanding the world. Contrasting quantum physics’ fluid, entangled view of reality with the linear logic of extractive capitalism, the piece questions whether quantum technologies will be used to sustain our current paradigm or radically reshape it.
Interactive station, ‘Fixing Futures,’ 2025 // Photo by Esra Klein
With a thoughtful and expansive curatorial approach that builds on substantial research and collaborative work with a range of experts, ‘Fixing Futures’ maximizes the use of the exhibition format, featuring artworks that speak to diverse perspectives and levels of complexity, alongside video interviews with experts that ground and expand on artistic takes. The participatory dimension is added through interactive stations where visitors can respond to speculative prompts ranging from “How will we live in the future?” to “What do ants think about their rights?”, as well as through a program of workshops and events that deepen the engagement. The result is a dense, layered resource that offers multiple entry points into the topic of planetary crisis and our collective futures. This ambitious undertaking reflects a refusal to settle for dystopian panic or resignation, instead insisting on cultivating critical insight, speculative imagination and productive hope. It’s a herculean but not impossible task that, in the spirit of Donna Haraway, provokes and morally binds us to “stay with the trouble.”
Exhibition Info
Museum Giersch of Goethe University (MGGU)
Group Show: ‘Fixing Futures. Planetary Futures between Speculation and Control’
Exhibition: Apr. 5–Aug. 31, 2025
mggu.de
Schaumainkai 83, 60596 Frankfurt am Main, click here for map
