Ana Tiquia creates spaces to embody diverse futures. She uses performance and participatory art, futures research and strategy; produces and curates exhibitions, installations, and immersive performances.
She has worked at the intersections of art, design, and technology with major cultural organisations and design practices in the UK and Australia, and is Founder and Director of All Tomorrow’s Futures – a cultural and strategic consultancy that helps clients develop artistic interventions that contribute to equitable and just futures.
Ana’s art practice explores participation in futuring and seeks to ‘future’ inclusively – with other humans, creatures, and things. Ana holds a BA in Fine Art, a Master in Strategic Foresight and she is currently completing a PhD in RMIT University’s School of Design.
Interviewed by: Reanna Browne
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Transcript
Reanna Browne
Hello and welcome to FuturePod, I'm Reanna Browne. Futurepod gathers voices from the international field or futures and foresight. Through a series of interviews, the founders of the field and the emerging leaders share their stories, tools, and experiences.
Please visit future pod.org for further information about this podcast series. Today, our guest is Ana Tiquia. Ana creates spaces to embody diverse futures. She uses performance in participatory art, futures, research and strategy producers and curates exhibitions, installations, and immersive performances
She has worked at the intersections of art design and technology with major cultural organizations and design practices in the UK and Australia. And is the founder and director of All Tomorrow's Futures, a cultural and strategic consultancy that helps clients develop artistic interventions that contribute to equitable and just futures.
Ana's art practice explores participation and futuring and seeks to do this inclusively with other humans, creatures and things. Ana holds a BA in fine arts, a master in strategic foresight. And she's currently completing a PhD in RMIT's university school of design.
Welcome to Future Pod Ana.
Ana Tiquia
Oh, thanks. Reanna it's, uh, such a joy to be here with you.
Likewise. All right, let's start with question one. This is the story of the guest and how you became a member of the foresight community. So, tell me about your practice. What are the threads that have been there all along and how did you end up doing what you're doing?
It's such a good question and a challenging one too. I think it's interesting with stories and I, I always find it challenging to know when to start because we of course can go far, far back, or we can keep them more contemporary. I guess. I was reflecting on it recently, and I think for me coming to a futures practice or a foresight practice like many things in life was completely unplanned but there were definitely some things along the way that, led me onto the path. I guess in terms of thinking about threads that have been more consistent through my practice, I'd say from when I was young, two of the things that were, a big part of my growing up where a passion for social justice. I grew up with an activist father who had been an anti Marcos activist in the Philippines.
So, I grew up going to rallies and protests, and one of the first times I ever appeared in a paper there's a very cute photo of me when I was two being taken to a rally that was hosted by the Filipino community in Melbourne to celebrate the inauguration of Corazon Aquino who was the Philippines first female president. And also who came into power after, Ferdinand Marcos, went into exile and left the Philippines. So that was always a really big conversation in our family and really having conversations about justice and equity and political conversations. And then I think the other sort of interesting thing was I, as a child, I always did have uh, a preoccupation with futures questions, and particularly around climate futures.
And I think growing up in the eighties and nineties, I was concerned about global warming and I was concerned about the environment in a wider sense. But I remember as a kid being curious about it in almost a playful way. So amongst the sense of concern that action was needed to address deep environmental challenges, as a kid, I guess, I was this sort of enthusiastic child survivalist. Um and I think the idea of sort of societal transformation and change in a changing planet was somehow exciting to me then. I remember absolutely begging my Mum to buy me from a bookstore is a book I still have now and it's called the hard times handbook. Which might give you some sense of the framing. But it was basically this book on how to survive in urban areas, in amongst blackouts and, electricity failures and potentially not having access to utilities that you'd have in built up developed places like, like Melbourne or, or big cities in Australia.
Somehow, I was enchanted by almost sort of this romantic sense of the possibilities of living life by candlelight. And would often, I think just annoy my family into getting them to turn off all the lights and explore what living without electricity was. And I think being an only child as well, helped me to have that idea sort of indulge somewhat.
So, um my early years were spent exploring what it might be like to cook over open flames, and I was really curious about how you can build sort of refrigeration units using insulation or, or old eskies. So those were the kinds of strange influences in my childhood that I think have somehow found their way into what my practice is today.
Reanna Browne
You've been rehearsing scenarios since you were a child and they're so, so relevant, you know, I'm thinking right now how timely it is that we're living in an existence where we have a percentage of the Melbourne population now with no power for a month.
Ana Tiquia
It's sort of sad to say that it's like almost 30 years on that, this is actually the reality that we're living in. I completely agree. I mean, there was a moment when I came across a box of old books and had to decide whether I would hold on to the hard times handbook or not and I conceded to that, it was actually an incredibly relevant book for our time. I still have it now and it's a good reminder for me to probably refer back to it more regularly.
I'd say the other theme that been really strong, throughout my life and has shaped my approach to doing futures work is really a love of creative practice and of arts practice. And I think one of the things I am hugely grateful for to my family and the circumstances that I had growing up was that I was able to grow up in a space where creativity and playfulness and being able to explore all forms of um, art making and writing and, um whether it would be illustration or drawing or playing an instrument where all those things were really encouraged and nurtured and creative practices has been really a driving force throughout all my practices.
So much so that when I graduated and went to university, I went to art school and studied media arts, which is part of a fine arts department at RMIT and what I was really curious about then was what was emerging in terms of digital technologies and also the possibilities, the internet, which was still a little fresher and probably a little bit more utopian than they definitely are now in 2021.
But I'd been really exploring all sorts of more traditional art forms but was really interested and curious about the possibilities of making work on new platforms and using different kinds of media working with computers was really interested in, in the kind of net art, and these sort of wild spaces of possibility in terms of what people were doing with code and creating online. And so that eventually took me to study media arts at RMIT, and I had for quite a while, a practice as a media artist or a more of a screen lens-based artist and did some work that was more installation based and ended up focusing more on experimental animation for a while and that eventually actually took me to the UK where I started a career working in the film industry.
I worked on a feature animation um, and had you know wonderful kind of early experiences of working professionally in the industry and getting to sort of see what the possibilities are of doing work in professional animation might look like. And through a few different twists and turns of fate ended up not working in film, but returning to working in an arts context with, the Philharmonia Orchestra. So, working with a big symphony orchestra in London where I actually joined a brand-new department, which was their digital department. And what was really interesting there is I ended up becoming their first digital producer and working with them to create a range of um, more digital audience engagement projects but ones that took the form of not just films and podcasts and kind of content online, but more immersive and experiential interactive exhibitions and installations that really sought to find a future for the orchestra, beyond the concert hall. And it was really interesting to work in the context of a very traditional arts organization who could see that their future was somehow limited by the fact that their audience was changing, and that their audience was rapidly aging.
And we were asking some really deep questions about their continued relevance in a world where, um, orchestral music may not be relevant and the modes of listening to and appreciating orchestral music and might also be quite foreign and intimidating too and present barriers to a lot of different communities.
So, it was really interesting to work with an arts organization who were really directly engaging with these challenges of their immediate future and to use creative as well as technological means to look at ways in which we could address those challenges and um, and, and work with them for a number of years, both producing exhibitions as well as touring exhibitions internationally.
Reanna Browne
I think there's such a powerful thread that helps capture, I guess the essence of your practice and that's that combination of creative practice meets social activism meets, a deep inquiry around how do we actually locate ourselves in a more embodied way through these transitions. It sounds like it's been there the whole time and now it's kind of manifesting more into the actual professional practice that you do now.
Ana Tiquia
It's so great to hear that you see those threads. I think sometimes it's there's all these things that come together to make obviously a career or a life really. And it's sometimes hard I think, you know, when you're in the midst of it to even see what those threads might be. There's definitely points where I look at my practice now and I ask, how did I actually get here? And I know that even engaging with people I might've worked with five years ago my practice has being transformed so greatly since then. I think, you know, being able to connect the dots sometimes might be challenging.
One of the things as well, I think that engaging in these questions about the future of arts organizations, that was really interesting to me as well as a producer was that, um, I'd often receive briefs from arts bodies or arts organizations, where they were clearly looking for a technologically mediated approach to solve a problem of organizational relevance into the future. And I think as my producing practice developed, I began to get more and more interested in the strategic thinking that sat behind those briefs and that really set behind the prescription of digital media or prescription of a digital technology to, in some ways, quote unquote save a cultural organization and, and make it relevant into the future.
And there were several cases where you know, I'd look at a brief and my instincts would be immediately to interrogate it a bit more and to question it because technology is definitely not a fix and I think I began to grow increasingly wary of the blanket idea that technology will save us across many domains, not just in cultural spaces. But also this idea that somehow, what we might see as a technological advancement as in specific types of digital or database technologies and systems would somehow enable an organization to exist in the future or would somehow be able to place it within a futures lens, and I think that kind of level of growing kind of criticality around, not just the digital platforms and the technologies and the tools and the uh, the structures and cultures as well, which they they'd been developed out of.
Increasingly the work I got more and more excited about was really, working with, with artists and designers who were engaging more critically around these, these issues of social and technological futures. And then increasingly questions of social, technological, and environmental futures and really framing digital and technology, digital art, or work that was using technological means to make comment on, you know, socioecological futures in a way.
Reanna Browne
You've inherently been doing this work all along, but what was that process where you then bumped into this more formal futures community?
Ana Tiquia
Yeah. So in terms of really starting to, encounter futures and foresight work, was actually when I was working for a strategy and strategic design studio called Thick back in Melbourne. And there, I had the very good fortune to work briefly alongside Beth Highland, who is one of the alumni from the masters of strategic foresight and was finishing up her master's at that time.
And what really struck me about what she was studying and working with was, uh, this fascinating ability to be able to hold uncertainty and to hold uncertainty with groups in these really interesting ways. And at that time as a producer, I worked on short term projects that had really limited lifespans in a way you would get some funding or you'd get a brief, and maybe six months, 12 months later you would deliver a project or a performance.
Um, so at the time kind of futures thinking, longer-term thinking wasn't so immediately um, central to my practice, or didn't seem to have too much bearing on my practice in a very immediate sense. But that started to change through the next couple of roles I had in cultural organizations after that, I actually ended up going back to the UK and and working as creative producer on an exhibition at Somerset House called big bang data.
It was a really amazing project to work on because it was working with a lot of artists and designers who were asking this is in 2015 so they were asking a lot of really pertinent questions about future uses of data and big data sets and really asking about the ethical and societal implications of an increasingly datafied society.
Some of the most fascinating, projects I was able to work with and, even artists, I was able to, work, um, produce and curate in that show were really artists who were engaging with speculative design practice.
So I was able to work with Sarah T. Gold who's a UK based, speculative designer who had this, amazing project called the alter net where she was engaging with imaginaries of the internet and looking at creating actually, these really interesting artifacts future artifacts that had imagined a different kind of internet into being. And we actually brought her into that particular exhibition at Somerset house, to present a project called data licenses. it was a speculative project that proposed, the development of, of data licenses, where individuals could enter into contracts with companies over how their data might be used. And was really about centering, the control of individuals and the ownership of individuals over their own data.
In 2014 or 2015, when she was developing this work, it itself demonstrated so much foresight in raising these issues around data ownership, but also um, creating tangible and really provocative, provocative, and engaging ways for people to actually reimagine what a different relationship between data ownership might be you know, at a time when, uh, the increasing collection of personal data seemed like it could only logically go in one direction.
Here was this provocation that asked people to reimagine what their relationship to data might be. And actually gave in some ways, some very concrete reimagining’s of how those relationships might be, designed differently.
Reanna Browne
It sounds like that kind of moment where you realize that there's a modality or a practice that actually explains what you've been doing all along. The practice found you and you found your practice.
Ana Tiquia
Yeah, it was exciting. I'd been working with creative practitioners, so artists and designers and different kinds of practitioners who'd been using new and emerging technologies as a creative media. And one's who'd been using them also to critique or be critical about the social kind of settings in which those technologies have been designed and developed. But it was really exciting to be working as well with practitioners using technology to re-imagine it, and to imagine possibilities otherwise.
In late 2015, I returned to Australia and took up a job at the Melbourne Museum. And I was working there as exhibitions producer, and I'd been hired to lead the development of a major permanent gallery. Which was a very different kind of project to produce because it was a longer term project.
It was a project that was going to unfold it over three to four years. And it was also very different in the sense that the project itself had legacy. So one of the main things about the project was that whatever we installed needed to be, able to speak to audiences over 15 to 20 years potentially after its installation date.
So as a producer, that was a really complex, brief, and also a really problematic one. I'd been used to producing exhibitions that were temporary or performances that were in some ways, more ephemeral so this idea of having to create, not just content, but, a framework and, um, modes of ways to engage people with ideas. And the topic of this particular exhibition was actually around the question of what it means to be human. So, thinking about, how these questions of biology and cultures of the body and things like that might evolve in 20 years, was also really challenging. And, and we had a number of questions on an organizational level to ask I think ourselves as a museum about how we design and build exhibitions for change and changing audiences, which weren't supported by the current exhibition development models, which usually involve investing a lot of money to create something that's new and shiny when it opens and then loses its relevance over the continuing years and eventually ages before it's replaced.
Reanna Browne
Again, just to kind of loop back to those threads that have been there throughout your life and the evolution of your practice, it's kind of that sense of you know, using creative contexts I guess, to unfreeze those everyday conversations about futures. And then as part of that, opening around how do we challenge orthodoxy and how can we challenge the grammar of what is possible here and how can we actually experience some of that in the present as part of that futuring practice where art crosses over with futures crosses over with design crosses over with change and transformation.
Ana Tiquia
You said that beautifully we should've just recorded you saying that then.
Reanna Browne
So our next question is really about some of those key methods that underpin the work that you do, or the philosophy that underpins the work that you do. I kind of see it as what's in your carrier bag of futures including both the technical work that you do, I guess, but also that underpinning belief system and philosophy in how and why you do your work.
Ana Tiquia
Yeah. I think for me, and this has been consistent across all, my practice has been really, a deep ethical commitment or a commitment to engaging any practice I'm involved in ethically considering its ethical entanglements and implications. And for me, as I had the opportunity to do a master's in strategic foresight, and obviously when I started my master's, I was anticipating that I would work organizationally to do futures work in, in cultural spaces.
I entered the course really interested in, how museums and other cultural organizations, imagine their own futures and design themselves for change. But what really evolved is I think thinking more broadly about our future, our shared future planetary futures engaging in those great conversations that emerged from our course around things like energy futures and climate futures.
I once again found much more of an awakening around what is the right practice as a futures practitioner with the skills and the methods that we have? What is the right practice in this particular time? And by that, I, I guess I'm really referring to, um, although it's a problematic term, the Anthropocene.
So, um, the Anthropocene, is obviously challenging, like the name itself centers, the human, which is unhelpful. But if we think of the term as really demarking a time that ushers in great change and change that also up ends the idea of human agency in relationship to the world. Actually, asks us to think about how a combination of agencies and forces beyond the human, constitute our survival and our thriving and our also the fact that we are embedded in systems of life and non-life, and we emerge from, that we're, that we, interconnected, embedded and entangled in a number of different life ways and contribute to them as well.
What does it mean to do this practice when we acknowledge we're living through the sixth mass extinction?
Um, obviously. That's a big shift from thinking about how a museum should design a long-term exhibition in a way but within the practice context, I feel, engaging these for me, at least engaging these questions ethically is really paramount. It's also, what's given me the energy to work through within the practice that I have, whether It is working in a museum context or whether it's working, in other cultural contexts how can I have these conversations with others? If I am doing futuring work, on projects how can I not talk about climate futures when we're talking about a 20-year projection for, for a client? What are the tactful ways to be able to have that conversation or the productive ways to be able to have that conversation?
There's parts, I think as practitioners where we piece together different, methodologies, which is inherently based on the way that we see our practice and do our practice and who we are as individuals, but it sounds like your carrier bag is very contextually driven.
And this sense that I get from you around, the unlearning dimensions that would be required as part of this constant shape-shifting within your carrier bag, and when I talk about unlearning here, it's not necessarily about a state of non learning, but it's, this is more about, new questions and new knowledge production, and then thereafter, what now is in my bag, in terms of how I actually do the work.
Exactly. And I think for me, one of the last things I expected to happen while I was moving through my masters was to return to my own art practice. And that's in fact, what did happen. It was really in terms of thinking through these questions, what I feel are urgent questions of, time that we're in, that I'm in.
And also, I guess acknowledging and looking really squarely at the grief I was experiencing, When I could truly acknowledge that our shared home, the planet and the places that we're living in are changing and changing rapidly and, may change to not be so supportive of, uh, human life in many ways, if we continue, going on the major trajectory that we're seeing especially around things like climate policy in Australia, or lack of. I think to phrase it a different way I feel like as you've pointed out, the context is really important to me and I feel that the context and the tools and the approaches, are all co-arising with each other in a way.
So, for me this desire to bring in particular, a participatory arts practice together with participatory futures practice has really been also to ask how futures practice can be developed, to ask questions about what the possibilities are for futures practice.
If future studies has had, a big history of evolving out of, Euro Western and north American context, what does it need to do now? If we're thinking, Anthropocene futures what kind of futuring tools do we need to talk about what's emerging and what's evolving in an Anthropocene, uh, emerging Anthropocene, realities or futures.? And I feel that for me as well, one of the big parts of the context in my practice that grows ever more important is is really actually about situating and contextualizing where I practice from you know, not only am I alive in this particular time but I'm also here as you know, an uninvited guest and a settler on unceded lands, in Australia or from, in my context on Wurundjeri country.
The Anthropocene is itself a legacy, or has emerged out of a history of colonization and also intertwined with that modernity. And, you know, these Euro Western concepts of modernity as well. And when I'm thinking about, what does it mean to practice ethically, on these unceded lands that have suffered the trauma of colonization and continue to, and people who continue to suffer the traumas of colonization?
I think, where does the futures practice that I've inherited sit with this as well?
Um,
And for me, I love the futures and foresight field in the sense that there are a diverse range of practitioners and practices in there. There is an openness to method. But when I look at the tools that we use, even tools that I love using and tools that I see the absolute benefit their use in particular contexts. We still all do preface our tools on, linear notions of time. The very fact that we are so focused on the futures, futurists is tell telling, even the profession itself is telling like this idea that a future can be disengaged from a present and a past. And I say that knowing that many of us very much value the future's role in bringing us back to a present and giving agency to a present and that concept has worked with in more nuanced terms.
But I do think it is telling that you've got this separation of the future out from all the other times, but also there is a really specific, fact that Western cultures have divorced time from space for more particularly place. So how do we reconcile the fact that we're working with the, within these kinds of colonial mindsets, the fact that we have also develop tools that still perpetrate this linearity in terms of futures thinking, and yeah look, these aren't easy questions that I have the answer to.
And. In some ways, they're big questions that you could spend easily, a lifetime unpacking and developing, ways to reckon with or negotiate and move through. But they are questions that really excite me too, in a way. And they're questions that I'm choosing to, to try and address through a creative practice, because I think within the lens of, of art-making and for me as well, participatory art-making there's, the scope to have really different conversations from different angles with different actors in different places.
Particularly in places where, futures or foresight conversations or work might not ordinarily happen.
Reanna Browne
I guess it's an underpinning philosophy that is inherent to any of the work that you do inside the carrier bag of your future's work is a critical investigation in terms of how we as practitioners, challenge our own taken for granted truths in the work that we do and our own limiting beliefs.
So this sense of unlearning our own practice as part of the work that you actually do, you know, or where your work becomes a process of enacting that inquiry is a really powerful way of you bringing your unique contributions to the field and then thereafter the field evolving as a result of that constant kind of unlearning relearning process.
Ana Tiquia
I feel that the possibilities for performing new types of futures, practice into being are here and these possibilities, obviously with, when we think about in terms of performing it or performance, that they are always located in the present, how is it that we perform our practice today?
Why do we perform it? Who does it benefit?
What kind of futures do our futures practices reproduce into the future, um, or produce into the future? Can we produce different futures through different reimagining’s of futures practice as well?
So, it does get very meta, which is where I feel actually a lot of my kind of questioning often goes with practice, but yeah, definitely.
And, I hate to say the word ontology, but, and of course ontology itself as its own kind of baggage in Western philosophy in particular. Obviously Western philosophies that divide, you know, ways of being like ontology from, epistemology as like, ways of knowing are also problematic, but just because it's the language that I've got to work with.
Definitely thinking about how we, what our ontological commitments are and our grounding is as practitioners what cosmologies we operate within and from. Are really important questions and ones that I feel like as a field, we haven't really necessarily, deeply engaged.
I think part of my fascination with this was growing up, very much in in a multi-ethnic and multi cultural household other philosophies, other ways of knowing and being were constantly not just being discussed, but being enacted.
And, you know, my father's a traditional Chinese medical practitioner so I grew up engaging with that body of knowledge but also with Daoist and Chinese philosophies that attended that. And, you know, I think one of the amazing things about philosophy or Daoist cosmology, which Ursula Le Guin completely picks up so beautifully in our work is the fact that Daoist cosmologies are ones that that see existence as I'm just going to try and use the words of David Hinton who's a translator. Who's translated a lot of classical Chinese poetry that's emerged at a particular Daoist and Chan Buddhist, like lineage, but he talks about the concept of the Dao as being this constantly changing membrane of existence of which everything is co constituted.
And when you've got such a refined philosophies that talk to that, talk in very different ways about how we understand change and how we understand ourselves in relationship to change. I feel like these kinds of knowledges and ways of being as well in the world, can't be ignored when we think about our futures practice around anticipating change or understanding change, you know, I feel instantly drawn to asking how as a practitioner I'm understanding change, and how I'm viewing concepts of time and place and space. So this has been for me an emerging space of research and practice, and I'm really trying to practice into it. And I think another thing for me has really been also engaging in in a particular zen Buddhist meditation practice and also being involved within a Buddhist community as well. And I think, when you've got concepts such as, of interdependence or even the concept of interbeing as kind of, uh, termed by, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, you know, you have encompassed within the concept of interbeing whole ontologies that, that speak to how things arise in the world and how things hold and how things fall apart.
And I feel as well, the way that my futures practice has been evolving in some ways has been kind of an, an additive one where I've been, you know, thinking with and practicing futures, but also thinking about how these other practices in my life, cultural and artistic practice, but also kind of meditative practices and, and other practices, can all inform each other in a way.
Reanna Browne
So as part of your carrier bag, what does that look like in practice?
I think if I was to try and give form to what these emerging tools look like um definitely they're informed by, you know, my creative and artistic practice. And, if I was to imagine what they look like, it would be a cloak, especially designed for shape-shifting. I feel that trying to perform or inhabit new forms is, I guess a tactic or a strategy that I am finding useful in doing more creative or experimental features work.
So when I had a project called workplace which was effectively a a pop-up office space on one of the streets in north Melbourne. And, I worked with a friend, Annie Woo who's a fashion designer and she created me a strange brown woollen suit.
That was halfway between a brown woollen suit and a set of pyjamas. And it was, it was a suit which when I've put it on, I could inhabit and an amorphous future workspace, which was designed to, you know, in 2019, this was pretty radical, to purposefully blend domestic and office spaces and was asking questions about the spaces we might work in, in the future.
Obviously by like March 2020 many people were working from an office that was also a bedroom or a home or a domestic space often in pyjamas. So, I like to think that was a little bit of predictive futures work I did there, but in all seriousness, what I found really interesting about being able to, perform in this space and the performance effectively was one where I played, this kind of combined role of a um employer slash fortune teller who would invite participants just people off the street to join me for 20 or 30 minutes and apply for a future job. So, I'd conduct a future job interview with them and what I loved about the suit that only made me was that it just allowed me to put something on at home. And then I would catch the tram into the art space where this installation was based.
But I could be, I could play a different character. And I didn't have to be, necessarily the foresight or futures practitioner. I didn't have to be a cultural producer, but I could be someone who existed in and an unspecified time and place. And some have by virtue of this suit, had the ability to ask people some interesting questions about their assumptions about work and jobs and what, what they thought an equitable and just future work might look like for them.
And I don't know what, what this would translate to as an object, but I think as well, play and play of course is a really big part of what I really value in the tool kit, so I guess maybe as an orientation or a, an aptitude and ability to play with, with questions in the future that inherently serious, I think that's one of the joys of working in creative and artistic led ways.
Um yeah, look kind of those moments of what really Uh, give me a lot of joy and excitement and I think with the playfulness you have to attend to it with a good degree of silliness. Like, you know, I don't think I could call this a quote unquote, serious futures practice, but why not?
Reanna Browne
If I think about our next question, which is really about how do you make sense of the emerging futures around you? You know, What are you paying attention to in terms of your own hopes and fears? What are some of the things that you're sensing is shifting?
Ana Tiquia
It's a really challenging question. My sense of what is emerging in the future is necessarily also very biased, um, because, I'm currently engaged in a research project, that's called creatures.
And it's looking specifically at the role that creative practices play in futures of socioecological transformation. So, I'm very aware when I say this, that I'm spending a lot of time with artists and looking at artists' work and artist work coming from predominantly Europe so a very specific part of the world. But, I feel like what has been one very strong thread that I've seen with a number of works that are, that are socially engaged or socio ecologically engaged, you could say has been really around the relational.
And I guess to, to go back to thinking about Donella Meadows and her framework of leverage points and places to intervene in the system. What I'm seeing is a number of artists and artist practices who are working and being drawn to working at that transcending paradigms level.
You could also say working ontologically, and really looking at how we can either repair relations or transform relations or create new relations with earth others that we share our lives and places and planet with.
And so I think it's really interesting to look at how these conversations around worldview have been popping up but also, this sense of urgency or desire to adopt relational worldviews and to better understand how relationships can be forged or reforged.
I think a lot of thinking around how to deal with the atomization and separation and also the individualization that's emerged from, Cartesian thinking um, that's been sort of promoted through Western modernity. And it has also been reinforced through like neo liberal mindsets too this idea of competition, the, these ideas of one against all, but I think that's what I've been attuned to and so I'd hate to sort of say that that's where I think the future is emerging to. I mean, I'd love, if that is where all of our futures are going in a way, but that's one thing that I've found really interesting in engaging, particularly artists work in future orientated spaces.
So, I mean, I think from a practice perspective the artworks that I'm creating and the pieces that I'm developing all have in many ways, I'd say this element of either trying to develop spaces where people can see their own embeddedness in any emerging future see their embeddedness in all sorts of systems, but also where they may also recognize different degrees of, agency or different abilities to participate in how the future shifts. And I think on a personal level, one of the elements of, particularly of my practice that I also say is speaking really nicely to, mindfulness and meditative practices, as well is that great concept of looking deeply.
If you look deeply at any given phenomenon at anything at ourselves, it's the recognition that, the looking deeply is both the act and the insight in some ways of seeing the mutually interdependent parts between ourselves and the cosmos. It also does enable us to see ways in which we can make differences. Some of those differences that can be significant and some of those might be very small. What I really appreciated about it is that it almost questions, concepts of scale, as well as scalability.
You may never know what a small action you know, mindfully taken what effects it might have, in 10 years, a hundred years, 500 years but you do it anyway.
Reanna Browne
It makes me really think that, part of the work is yes, that sensory element around how's the context changing, but then back to the point of the relational nature of how you do your work It's that reflection back in how do we move through the future as the future moves through us?
Ana Tiquia
Ah, there's such beautiful provocations really. I feel like the question about what's in the tool set it's evolving with this. And I think the nice thing about coming back to creative practice and working with creative practice to try and answer or work with some of those questions is that it opens up a space for the methods or the tools to sometimes be spontaneous, but also to come sometimes come really out of left field.
And at the moment, one of the things that I'm really curious to develop more around is tools and methods that ask how we can do futuring with more than human worlds. Acknowledging that that all of our futures are created through the complex interplay and interaction between human non-human living non-living entities, then how do we actually develop a futures practice that allows the participation of the non-human that recognizes the agency as well of non-human beings or more than human beings.
Um, it's a, an interesting creative, question too. Do we have those tools in the toolkit yet? I don't think so, but there's other tools there's other modes of, of being and listening and of knowing that we might also recognize that we have within ourselves or have within our cultures. And maybe those can be ones that we draw upon when we're thinking about how to move futures, practice into these different kinds of spaces to have these different kinds of conversations.
Reanna Browne
Mmm more than human futuring. beautiful.
Reanna Browne
Question four is a simple question, but quite a complicated one to answer. It's how do you explain to people what it is that you do?
Ana Tiquia
Ahgh Reanna this is the ultimate question. I mean, it's the million-dollar question for me because I find it increasingly difficult to explain to people what I do.
Actually talking with you now, I feel like I have a better way to answer your question, which is, you know, what I call myself. And I think I increasingly feel that you know in a year or in two years time, I probably won't be able to refer to myself as a futurist practitioner or as a futurist.
There is something I think I've horribly explained, which has to unfold all paths for presents and futures. But at the same time I still, with other practitioners, do feel that even as, even if we do see the future as a construct or a space that's been socially mediated and created, and is sustained or challenged in different ways that, that there is something powerful about how we work with these constructs or how we might use a future to reflect on a present or imaginings in a future space.
But yeah, look, I mean, if I can come back to you in two years time and tell you what I'm calling myself, it might all be a lot clearer.
Reanna Browne
At the start of our conversation, we explore this idea of what was the right work for you in these times. And I'm really curious about this because I think choosing creative practice is a very purposeful act. The way I see it, I think it sits, or it can often sit outside of a dominant system. The work is often not seeking what's requested by the current paradigm.
So, I'm really keen to hear more about some of those creative projects that you've either been working on or that you will be working on.
Ana Tiquia
Yeah. So, I'm so glad to hear that, you feel similarly, I'm particularly excited by the possibilities of using artistic and creative practice at the intersection of that and futures practice. And for 2022 I've got a few projects that are coming up that I'm really energized and excited by.
The first of which Reanna you'll be very familiar with because it's actually a collaboration with you. So as you know, but perhaps our listeners don't know, the two of us have been awarded a state library of Victoria fellowship to develop a multi-part audio series that looks at, the future of work, from the lens of Melbourne's labour, history and workers in Melbourne past present and future and seeking to centre their voices.
I guess one of the things I'm really excited about this is that the two of us have been having for of good couple of years, some really robust, conversations about the need to centre workers, voices, in future of work conversations and debates. And what we've been presented with is this really amazing opportunity. Not only to work, together to develop this as a project that has a creative output, as well as integrating, futures, research and, and historical research as well.
But this really amazing opportunity to explore an incredible collection. So basically, a collection of papers, as well as reference books, artworks objects, and resources that are held by the state library in Victoria. Melbourne was actually a centre like a real locus of international labour movements in the 18 hundreds worldwide. And that Melbourne workers were really some of the first along with workers in Sydney to actually go on strike and demand better conditions.
And to usher in the introduction of a 40 hour working week, and an eight hour day.
Reanna Browne
I'm just going to quickly jump in here because I think it could be worth mentioning to, our listeners that some of the spirit that sits behind that project is really beautifully captured, I think by a quote from Ana Jain, um, and I'll probably get this wrong, but she shares the sentiment that those with the least power to shape the future suffer its worse consequences. And I think that's a really powerful quote that really sets up the intention and the framing behind, After Work.
Ana Tiquia
Yeah I agree so much Um I think there's just so much richness to there about how we can invite invite in those who don't have a voice or a given limited voice on a number of different kinds of platforms.
All these futures that emerged as well, a shared futures, their futures that we share with others and ones that we co participate in. You know, our future is not just made by one person, even if it's a person with a very loud voice it's made by many voices and many actions and yeah, look, it's been exciting to think about the possibilities of asking how we can use different, um creative ways to hear the voices of workers from across time and create some interventions in, in the present
Reanna Browne
So in addition to After Work what are some of the other projects that you've got coming up that you'd like to share?
Ana Tiquia
Yeah. So , there's a couple of other projects as well. And I guess, broadly speaking, what I'm really excited about the projects that are coming up is that I think they embody or represent , a few different parallel strands of research that are really exciting and interesting to me at the intersections of art and futures research.
One of the projects which have hopefully we'll be embarking upon early next year, it's a, it's basically a residency, where I'll be embedded in a rural community in Western Australia and we'll be working with community to explore the theme of rural utopias.
So this is a community based art residency, which you will be hosted by the cannery, which is, uh, an art centre based in Esperance uh, rural city, uh, which is basically about eight hours drive from Perth along the coast in the south of Western Australia. And it's a really interesting project because it's also, it's being co-produced by, international Artspace who've for over 20 years have hosted a range of different artists and practitioners to do work.
In rural and regional areas and parts of Western Australia, and also with the art gallery of Western Australia and working with the art gallery what we'll be looking to do is find ways to bring together both these community conversations around utopia and rural utopias, trying to find ways to actually, locate those conversations or intersect those conversations in some way with the art gallery collection.
But more generally, I think, you know, being able to kind of and engage communities and really talk about what, what even a good future looks like, I think is a valuable and interesting activity in and of itself.
And another project, which I've B I've been working on um, with another collaborator, another artist called Luna Mrozik Gawler, is a project that we'll be premiering, as a part of the Australian network for art and technologies annual symposium, which is which next year is on the theme of multiplicities.
But we've been developing some work, that involves aspects of performance, live performance. But we play the role of visitors from the future in a way future envoy. More specifically in this work we were developing, we were exploring the idea of being Futurecrats.
So, we are bureaucrats from the future. Uh, In, in the future, we are emerging from uh, bureaucracy has, uh, continued sadly., But we're using this as a, as a playful device to actually talk about transformative futures in a way. So, looking at a future where there's been a transformation in values and the particular features we're exploring at the moment, ones where there's been a shift in values that decentres the human in a way, a shift in values, which where we're sort of visiting from a society where the contribution of many different species beyond humans is recognized and I guess respected.
And we’re using this in a playful way to intervene in, in art spaces. And in this case in an arts symposium, so kind of thinking playfully about, well, if we would explore futures through a multi-species lens what would that practically even look like.
So, um, that's sort of an emerging work, which we're been having a lot of fun with in its initial development stages and also looking forward to developing further, um, as we move into next year.
Reanna Browne
Perhaps this is the tie off, but there there's no totalizing approach to this work. So for me, I'm really excited by the work that you're doing and its contribution to the field and more broadly to society in these times, both from that kind of unlearning and relearning perspective, but work that is deeply contemplative and relational and creative and more than human I think is really powerful in these times. And it helps evolve our own practice, I think.
Ana Tiquia
Thank you so much Reanna that's, it's really lovely to hear that that's how you're receiving my work. And I hope it is making a contribution in whatever way it can to, to the futures field as well. I think although I work across different spaces in different fields as well, the futures and foresight community is really one where I feel very much at home and, and I think as well for that kind of, quite deep love for what it is that we're all some somehow struggling try to do in our own ways.
Reanna Browne
I think, as you've been talking about your work it really reminds me that, you know we don't often feel the operation of the mind and thus, we don't often feel the operation of our own futuring and our own ways in which we do our practice. If you ask us why we do what we do or how we do what we do, sometimes we don't have access to those processes that actually are really critical in influencing, what we do and have perhaps influenced what we've been doing all along. So hearing you talk about and tie the threads between, your childhood and growing up and how that has informed a very unique lens in which to do this work has been a really powerful story to share.
Ana Tiquia
Thank you so Reanna like, it's been such a pleasure. And I think I'm also just so grateful for the opportunity to be able to have a conversation with you like this in some ways more of a formal setting in the sense it's being recorded. But having the opportunity to talk with you about what I'm doing or what appears to be emerging from what I'm doing I feel like I've also possibly come to a bit of a deeper understanding about what it might be too or where it might be going. So thank you so much for the invitation and just the opportunity to have a dialogue.
Reanna Browne
This has been another production from future pod. Future pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist for the generosity of supporters. If you'd like to support future pod, go to the patron link on our website. Thank you for listening. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. This is Reanna Browne saying goodbye for now.