Future Perfect, 21st Century

Swiss artist Marie Velardie’s works are intimately connected to time and explore the links that bind humanity’s past and present to the future. She often works like an archivist, assembling projections drawn from science and popular culture to create a ‘memory of the future’.

Future Perfect, 21st Century (2006) is a timeline of the 21st century culled from science fiction books and movies of the 20th century. In it are descriptions of the future and alternate scenarios of the emerging present– some eerily plausible, others funny and absurd but none completely dismissible. The artist traces the origin of this work to the year 2000, which opened wide a new century that she found difficult to imagine. In reaction, Velardie turned a cartographer of the future, assembling in this work an engaging map; a guidebook for the time traveler. The scenarios she lists form an eccentric mix– ranging from complete civilisational collapse and migration to Mars to a world where everyone speaks Portuguese. Future Perfect, 21st Century is a playful yet profound reflection of the ways in which a past generation imagined the century to come.