We propose a congress to find out: We go into the future to see clearer, to see the ruins of our present, the ruins of a future. We call it retro-futuristic.

Last March in Berlin,
last May in Johannesburg,
next March in New Delhi,
(Moscow and Beijing to follow next year, and Rome)
In Tel Aviv we started building an archive of the future.
What happened: It is the year 2081 and we have forgotten everything. Men are forbidden, drama is forbidden, democracy is forbidden. There are rules, laws, algorithms, but there is no memory left, no history. Then, in South Africa, in India, in Brazil, fragments are discovered, which point to something that used to exist. Archives, hard discs, books, knowledge.
We have to put the pieces together.
On the first day of the Congress 12 women (men are forbidden!) try to make sense of the present and the past: short talks, music, performance, film, a fashion show. Anthropologists, historians, shamans and their clones: 2081 only women are allowed – how will our world change? Why were men forbidden? What was violence? All that is left is neo-yogaism.
On the second day of the Congress there will be a walk, men will accompany us. The displaced, the rightless, nomads, holy men. Men are forbidden. Men are no longer cloned. Walking is a psychogeographic strategy to open up the world. The „dérive“, this is how the situationists called it. There is something shamanic about it. Walking opens urban and utopian rooms.
And this is our goal: We go into the future to escape a present that is stuck. We bring our own paranoia to the table. We are in this together.
Our view is on the future through the future. We have looked at the years 1980/81 in our recent research – from the distance of 30 years we have pieced together the present. Now we want to look at the next 70 years. What happened? With the use of fiction we describe the future in a narrative way. We are interested in what Umberto Eco called the “etc. function”, we look for the elastic possibilities of reality.
This congress combines artistic and scientific positions. Learning plus fun. A laboratory of the transient. How will this world change in a time where change not longer is marked by the sign of what was before and is to come? We look for symptoms and traces of a future truth. We believe that art is powerful, if it manages to smuggle fictional constellations into reality, if the possible and/or the invisible becomes visible and the obvious merges into the background.
As Yoda says in “Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back” from 1980:
“Hard to see, always in motion, the future”.