EP 183 - APF IF 2023 Awards Spotlight - Transformative Food & Museum Repatriation

 
 

We are delighted to continue our new podcast series based on the Winners and honorable mentions from the APF 2023 IF Awards. Today we hear from Estefania Simon-Sasyk and the folks at Transform and their work with the Mycelium network to transform food systems and Elizabeth Merritt and her work assisting Museums use futures tools to help the repatriation of cultural artifacts.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward with Maggie Greyson and John Sweeney

Estefania Simon-Sasyk - Transform and Mycelium

Transcript

Peter Hayward: Welcome to the FuturePod Spotlight Series on the APF IF awards for 2023. In 2022 the APF changed from the most Significant Futures Work Awards to the IF Awards. Let's hear from Maggie what the IF awards are all about.

Maggie Greyson: The awards served as an invaluable resource for pointing clients. and the future's curiosity towards understanding the nature of work.

If questions, What If X, then y, are central to what we do as curators, facilitators, and researchers in supporting communities, organizations, and institutions to explore the futures.

John Sweeney: In celebration of the APF 20th anniversary, MSFW was re imagined as the APF IF Awards to reflect the globality, diversity, transdisciplinarity of the organization and the futures and foresight field. The Reimagined IF Awards program recognizes the evolving excellence in futures and foresight work with an emphasis on key thematic areas such as impact, imagination, and Indigenous.

 

Peter Hayward: Those awards are done and dusted and now we are here to celebrate the winners and special mentions. So get ready to hear from people doing important futures and foresight work all over the globe that is innovative, inclusive, indigenous, and much, much more. So on with the show.

Okay, Maggie, who have we got?

Maggie Greyson: I'm really excited about this one. I'm really excited about all of them, but this one is particularly cool and sideways imaginative thinking.

In fact, it actually won in the Imaginative category. Interspecies surrogacy, a catalyst for climate recovery. CARRYKIN contemplates new models of kinship, the ethics of care, and the possibility of more equitable Biodiverse futures centered around climate recovery.      This immersive installation at Blindside Gallery in Melbourne presented an examination room in a future community care clinic for an inter species surrogacy program using artificial womb technology. Design fiction that includes extensive world building with government policies, campaigns, On a scientific basis, the installation queers the concept of gestation to explore multi species kinship and care obligations to imagine a future of inter species care and climate recovery.

What I think is cool is the shift in framing climate crisis, catastrophe to climate recovery. So it's moving the discourse beyond a collapse scenario by provoking the potential. Now what scenario? The judges commended the project's innovative and transformative approach to rethinking human nature relationships through the powerful concept of human animal surrogacy.

They praised its immersive storytelling that connects emotionally and intellectually, provoking deep reflection on urgent environmental issues while inspiring hope for climate recovery. The multifaceted presentation with research Artifacts, campaigns was applauded for comprehensively exploring this speculative future.

Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod Estefania.

Estefania Simon-Sasyk: Thank you.

Peter Hayward: And I'm gonna start with a congratulation for your work. You are one of the 2023 Most Significant Futures Works as judged by the APF in the category of Ingenuity. So just congratulations to you and your friends.

Estefania Simon-Sasyk: Thank you so much, Peter. We're super honored to be a part of this bunch with a lot of people that we really admire. Shout out to John Sweeney, a huge mentor in the future space.

Ratana amazing FAO futurist doing really inspiring work in the future of food. So we're in really good company.

Peter Hayward: So do you want to just start Estefania with just for the listeners a little bit about yourself, your group, where you're from, and really what kind of was the Genesis of this piece of work?

Estefania Simon-Sasyk: So every time that I get asked this question, I really want to bring awareness to my country. Although it seems like old news in the crazy new cycle that we live in. So I was born and raised in Venezuela to immigrant parents from Eastern Europe and Lebanon via Chile.

So I was a theater kid, a rebel kid, but in the context of social and political unrest in my country, that continues to this day. So I really want you to understand that Venezuela has not been solved. And this conflict is fueled by never-ending oil money. So the theme of the youth of my country and my youth as well has been one of immigration.

So you study. And you leave. And yeah, I felt that urgency too. And I landed in a very boring language program. And after my grandma passed, I just went into the kitchen to find some refuge. My mom saw that interest. She was nervous and she said go study cooking. The next uni intake starts.

And in that time I discovered cooking. And the kitchen and the restaurant tribe and I was absorbed by it. So time came for admission in the uni and I scored a spot in the journalism faculty. But I think it was too late. I was packing my bags to go to Europe and intern for a three-Michelin star chef.

I spent 13 years working professionally, cooking in restaurants, many of them fine dining, but of all kinds in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. And then one day I fell off a motorbike in Indonesia. I think this is a pretty common story. And I couldn't cook for three, four months. I was basically sitting after spending 13 years on my feet working.

So it made me really concerned about my over-reliance on my body for income. So I started looking for and more knowledge jobs, research and development. In the meantime, I still opened my first restaurant in Bali. But I ended up landing in the Bass Culinary Center Innovation Business Unit.

This was an amazing strike of luck. I cannot be grateful enough to these people. At the time this R& D section was like a startup and I got to explore a lot of things. So the first meeting I had with my boss, I said, Hey, I really want to explore cassava recipes. As a future crop and she said, ah, future, funny you mention it, we have a future food initiative. Why don't you do that?

And my husband, Daniel Riveong had just finished his Masters in Foresight at Houston University. So I was like I'm sure I can ask him a couple of questions. So I said, yes, I can do that. And yeah, we started running this future food initiative, which was based on events all over European cities with experts to explore what could the future be?

This was like. Seven years ago now and resulted in reports about the future of food. Some of them award winning from the APF as well. So thank you for that. And slowly I started pivoting into regional development. We started to get a lot of interest in the innovation center from governments that wanted to use food as a tool for development, which I am a firm believer of, it's a great strategy.

And so of course the link was very obvious of using Foresight and especially participatory futures in these projects in the development space. So we started, doing strategies anchored in food for Latin America and Europe, again, all guided by two amazing Foresight mentors, John Sweeney and Daniel Riveong.

And then I started my Mycelium Gastronomy Network. This is where the group that I created TRANSFORM, with, which is the initiative that we won the APF award. So Mycelium is a community and a consultancy, but we are a horizontal, adaptable organization whose team and consultants are all independent experts and practitioners from this community of practice.

So like chefs, of course, futurists, designers, people who work in commercialization innovation experts, and many more anthropologists, and historians. We have a lot of people. And so the way organization starts is mimicking the mycelium network, and this is why we have this name.

Yeah. So we're a decentralized network that articulates themes based on needs, but basically, the way we make sense out of this is that we're fueled by our theory of change. So we really want to transform the food system, which is one that every single person in the world touches on a daily basis.

Our global food system generates, I think the World Bank said 12 trillion, in hidden social, economic, and environmental costs each year, including being the source of nearly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. We can do better.

And we aim to make the food system local yet powered by global knowledge. So this is why Mycelium is really powerful for us. We make, we aim to make it just and regenerative. And to do so we work with. Private and public organizations, not only in strategy and using futures in a speculative way, but also bringing this to product development, to program development, to actually carrying out the work.

And we also worked in direct action with citizens through education. So this was a long tour, because I wanted to give you a bit of the context, but this is who I am. This is what Mycelium does. And this is the Melting Pot where TRANSFORM, came to be.

Peter Hayward: So TRANSFORM, Mycelium. Can you maybe now talk a bit more about, because there's obviously a lot going on. You're obviously going for highly decentralized, fractal ways of working, bringing people in using food is a common touch point for everybody because you're right, it does touch every every person, but also most industries, and also touches the environment and also touches the climate situation. So this approach, what are you trying to do with people and communities?

Estefania Simon-Sasyk: For the public sector, we want to use food and the images of the future of food to empower local communities.

So very much in the context of regional development, we are both helping people imagine different futures, alternative futures for their food systems. But also helping them add value to their most undervalued, most wasted crops namely cassava, banana, and many other native plants that are completely unknown to even, national markets.

We also are doing trainings. We are heavily focusing on entrepreneurship by youth, who are so vulnerable. Specifically in the case of Latin America, where the big story not being told is how the narco is taking over a region. So we're trying to provide alternatives for the youth in terms of providing entrepreneurship pathways in food service, food CPG development as startups, and community-based tourism.

So this is for the public sector. And again, the idea is a more fair, a more just, a more regenerative food system which stems in biodiversity, empowerment of local communities. And this part of the equation, but we do believe that a very important part of the equation is also the private sector.

So we both engage the public sector in this regional development strategies. So creating ad hoc products for them with communities. So there can be a leveling of the playing field if you might. But we also are helping them approach or make more approachable science knowledge.

So of course you could go and have a AI do a crawl of the 10, 000 articles on say enzymes or all these new technologies that are more efficient, more planet friendly, et cetera. But we really have noticed that having an expert that can, go and cherry-pick after their PhDs, really being a huge expert on these topics, accelerates how these companies can just streamline their change towards more sustainable practices.

And of course, education, right? Yes, it's good to work with governments. It's good to work with private companies, but we also want to have direct action. So we work with a bunch of universities. Talking about food systems decolonization, feminist food systems, by the way we are holding a seminar this Friday about future feminist food systems. It will be recorded, so we'll make this available when possible.

And so really trying to push the idea of how the food system can look different. We also have a suite of Free education courses on our website. So if you don't know anything about the food system, no excuse, half an hour, you can get a bit of a roundup.

So yeah, it's just fueled by passion.

Peter Hayward: It sounds like passion. So I think you don't sit around and talk about food. I think you're a lot more hands-on, mouths on, and stomachs on. So I think you're taking food from a concept to food as both a physical reality, but also a shared experience as well as a cultural experience.

Estefania Simon-Sasyk: Yes, totally. And if I might use this great segue to talk about TRANSFORM, that would be I think a good place to.

We created this concept called TRANSFORM.

The context is we believe foresight and futures is an incredibly powerful tool, and it really helps to seed transformative change.

But in our experience on the field with practitioners, as you were saying, like, when you go and gather and try to figure out how can we imagine better futures with farmers, chefs, factory workers, entrepreneurs. We noticed the terminology and the dynamics of doing foresight work felt very academic, like hard-to-access, it has been our practitioners' experience.

So basically we're seeomh this thing can transform the food system. We can really seed change, but on the other side, we were creating barriers to entry by forcing stakeholders to write things down on post-its, which may seem, in our little bubble of innovation, foresight, or, knowledge workers, like a very intuitive, easy, obvious way of thinking, but it really… and me, as a chef can tell you, it's not as easy to go from like chopping something to, “Oh, I'm going to write one idea and then post it, right?”

It just, it isn't that accessible and it takes a steep learning curve to get the hang of it. So if you're lucky enough to get your stakeholders in a room for two hours, three hours. Two days. Are you really going to spend this time teaching them how to use your little toy?

Which for us, it wasn't the case, as you were saying, we are very much people of action. We wanted to bridge this gap because we have noticed, even when we were in this clunky phase of “Hey, write this in post its”, or “tell me what you're thinking and I'll write it down on a post it”.

We really noticed that exploring future opportunities, but especially focusing on food opens a really amazing window into people's life. Everyone wants to talk about what food they grew up with or what they do to feed their children. I get almost emotional because it is, I think a very emotional thing, food, right?

So it really gives an amazing entry point to people's life and, and then you can go and talk about even challenging topics that just emerged. So just and sorry to say, but like intimate partner violence or drug abuse. Whereas if you go there and say, Hey, tell me about your intimate partner violence.

They'd be like no, thanks. Who are you? But then you start talking about recipes, how you feed your children. What could you do with this? How can we create, opportunities for you in this space? And then this kind of issues just emerge, right? So with this powerful topic or entry point or window that is food it prompted the question, like, how can we redefine the dialogue and move beyond these tools like post-its as, proxies for proficiency or smarts, or, basically knowing your shit, to conversations about our shared future.

So creating new communal spaces becomes critical in the context of the need for urgent action that we live in. You said food touches on the climate catastrophe and it really helps to be like, okay, let's get to work, right? And this is why we created Transform. Transform leverages the power of shared food preparation to foster connections and conversations.

So we all gather around the table and engage in tasks like, cutting and peeling. So creating a familiar and intimate space. I think we all can identify with being in the kitchen counter with our moms or grandmas or whoever, like helping out, doing something, chopping, peeling, whatever.

And so this is what we do. It is designed for diverse food system stakeholders. And, it facilitates these horizontal discussions on our collective legacy to future generations, future opportunities, basically the stuff that us futurists care about.

And, it prompts the exploration of how individual actions, so me peeling, can contribute to collective goals, us getting to sit in a table and eat, right? This approach utilizes foresight methodologies, which we are a firm believer are great tools. But, it makes it invisible. So it emphasizes the collective and mapping pathways rather than the tools themselves.

So we advocate for candid discussions about shaping collective futures, emphasizing the need to reconnect with the collective. And this transcends the typical gourmet experience, and it actually focuses on the transformation of a once mundane task into a community space. It's kind of innovation, but at the same time, it's preservation of old ways in the face of modern life's challenges. So this is TRANSFORM. And this is what we got an award for.

Peter Hayward: Yeah, you did. I'm an academic futurist. So I'm going to play back a few things that I think you're touching on that I think are central to this work. Because as you've said, a lot of futures work can be very heady. It can be very much driven by thought. A couple of things I think your TRANSFORM process is doing is you're bringing emotion into the thinking. So rather than thinking without emotion, it is thinking with emotion, because food is an emotional exercise. Secondly, food brings up memory, because it's the food we ate with people who are no longer here, or if we're in a different country. And so food gives us memory. And those two things, because the future is not this sparkly, imaginary new thing that's out there. It's actually something that we are going to move from our past. with parts of our past that mean the most, and we're going to carry them into the future. And the emotion and the shared connection of food together is in fact how we build the future.

Estefania Simon-Sasyk: Totally. I mean It's not just food, it's just people is emotional. I always forget names, I'm so sorry, but this guy got an economy noble prize for saying people don't make rational decisions. Yes, thanks, we know that.

So yeah, I think it is good to bring emotion to the table in terms of like even strategic planning, because that's how it's going to be received by emotional beings. So that's a great that's a great take on what we're doing. And I think that's an angle that needs to be further explored for sure.

Peter Hayward: I think yours is an exemplary process for taking powerful concept tools, but making them deeply human and deeply relevant to people. So you don't need to be an expert to understand how food works.

Estefania Simon-Sasyk: No, you don't. Complex global food supply chains, that's another thing. But we all have, we all have touchpoints. We all know at a certain degree stuff about food for sure.

Peter Hayward: So the last question for you, Estefania, just before we wrap this up is what's next? What's the future of TRANSFORM? What do you want it to be and to take the opportunity when you're talking to the listeners of the Pod about things that they can participate in, if this future is also open to other people to get involved in.

Estefania Simon-Sasyk: Definitely. We want to make a transform as a tool, as a methodology available for you guys in your work in transformation. In community-based transformation.

More specifically, if you're working along the food system we do believe that this tool can be of immense value to you. We have used, for example, TRANSFORM within Navarra, which is a regional government here in Spain with food system stakeholders to devise the Sustainable Gastronomy Manifesto, which was sponsored by the regional Tourism Board. And we came together, we prepared a very typical dish and then shared a meal and came out with this manifesto that more than 60 stakeholders from the food chain signed. And this is actually now a foundational document for their long-term strategy in terms of food and food tourism as well.

So we have already began to see how effective the tool actually is. And, it has helped overcoming that resistance to the tools. It emphasizes effective communication, accessible entry points. There's a lot of valuable lessons there that we would love to share with any of you that are working with diverse stakeholders and highlighting the importance of inclusive spaces and community-centric approach.

Our ask, if you work in community engagement in the future space, especially food systems transformation and are looking for pathways towards change, I would love for you to get in touch and find ways to make this tool available for you.

We want to multiply the impact of the experience, and we can provide local assistance because we have 100+ network nodes distributed globally in the US, Latin America, South Europe, Nordics, Southeast Asia, and a couple of nodes in Africa.

So it would really allow food practitioners to incorporate the tool and use it confidently in their practice. The ultimate goal is to provide change makers in the food space with a tool and a support system to accelerate collaboration pathways by creating a safe space that allows the emergence of collective intelligence or, better decision-making.

Get in touch.

Peter Hayward: What I'm hearing is you have a feast, but the generosity of wanting to share the feast with the people who aren't currently at the table.

Estefania Simon-Sasyk: Yes, please do reach out. This is available for you. Would love to get in touch with you, wherever you are.

Peter Hayward: Estefania, it has been an absolute joy to meet you and hear about your fantastic work with TRANSFORM. Again, I want to congratulate you and your team and your friends on having TRANSFORM recognized as one of the 2023 Most Significant Futures Works, in the category of Ingenuity. So just well done to you and your friends.

Estefania Simon-Sasyk: Thank you. I'd like to have a shout-out to them. Patricia Jurado, Constanza Diaz del Castillo Velazquez, and Carles Tarrasó. Thank you guys for making this concept become a reality.

Peter Hayward: And thank you for taking some time out to have a chat with the FuturePod community.

Estefania Simon-Sasyk: Thank you, Peter. This was really great.

Peter Hayward:I hope you're enjoying the podcast. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We are able to do podcasts like this one because of our patrons, like Rebecca Ryan, who's been an active patron for the past four years. Thanks for the support, Rebecca. If you would like to join Rebecca as a patron on the Pod, then please follow the Patreon link on our website. Now, back to the podcast.

Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Merritt: Thank you, and I'm so happy to be here. I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today.

Peter Hayward: Thanks and congratulations for the Honourable Mention for your piece of work, Envisioning Repair and Reconciliation, Museums Exploring Voluntary Repatriation where you employ a favored futures method, The Three Horizons, to help your colleagues in other museums find the courage and optimism to start this important process. So how did that start?

Elizabeth Merritt: Let me give you a little bit of context. I am the vice president of strategic foresight and founding director of the American Alliance of Museums’Center for the Future of Museums.AAM is the National Museum Association for museums all types and sizes in the U. S. Big zoos, art museums, little tiny historic houses, children's museums, everything in between.I need to say this for an international audience: we're not a government agency. We're a private non-profit, similar to an academic or trade association.One of the big things we do is we help museums get together and talk to each other and decide what they think they ought to be doing and how they ought to behave.

We're the nexus for creating voluntary standards and best practices. With great power comes great responsibility and, of course, with so many museums looking to us for guidance, we're very aware of the fact that we can start conversations that have a lot of influence.

This is going to be an interesting interview for me, Peter, because I'm usually trying to explain foresight to museum people.I've got a lot of practice how to say that in plain English and get the concepts across. Now I'm aware I'm talking to a foresight audience about museum geekery. I have to think about how to ease into this in a way that's accessible. So I wanted to preface this explanation by hooking people with a plain English explanation ofthe issue, if you will indulge me. Museums have millions of objects in their collections. Most of it the public never gets to see because it's for research or it's being preserved for the future. Some of that stuff has a problematic backstory. Some of it was obtained underquestionable circumstances.

Often with the best of intentions in the part of the museum. For example, there may have been a Jewish family fleeing the Nazis, pressured into selling their possessions, which is what we call a forced sale . And somewhere down the line, some of those objects might have been sold or donated to a museum.

Still, that’s tainted provenance in terms of how the material ever left the family to begin with. And some things that end up in collections were outright taken through violence, such as when the British expeditionary forces looted Benin in 1897, or when American soldiers cut the heads off of Cheyenne people after the Sand Creek Massacre and shipped them to the Army Medical Museum.

Real crimes against humanity. Museums are left holding the material that are the result of those terrible incidents. There are laws, national laws, international laws and treaties, that mandate the return of some of this material.

And in those cases you can go to the law for some of the answers. But a lot of it falls into big gaps, in part because there are holes in the laws: the statute of limitations has expired, or the tribal community bringing a claim isn't recognized by the federal government that passed the law. Just for an accessible example, any reasonable person might look at the material in the British Museum, the Benin Bronzes, and say if that was looted from Benin, can we really justify keeping this stuff?

Shouldn't it go back to Benin? Which is complicated for a lot of reasons because Benin doesn't exist as a nation  anymore, but let's put that aside for a second. It's still a reasonable question. And then it gets even stranger because there are cases where acquiring a collection might have been entirely legal and ethical and above board at the time, but because of changing circumstances, the community from which those objects came actually need them more than the museum does right now.

For example, the National Museum of World Cultures in Sweden, which has an incredibly fabulous international collection, found that they held some ceremonial objects from the Yaqui culture in Mexico, some of which were gifted or sold to  two Swedish women by friends of theirs who were Yaqui: that was was an entirely amicable relationship.

No intimations there was anything improper, but since then, the Yaqui have been displaced, and dispossessed of their original lands. Some of them were moved within Mexico, some of them fled to Arizona[EM1] , and in the end, tribal representatives requested the return of the sacred material, saying this is necessary to keep our culture alive.The museum thought about it and worked through the complications of who to give it back to, since there were different groups that had settled in different areas, but in the end they voluntarily returned it to Mexico two years ago.

That illustrates this big issue because it's an issue for museums, it's an issue for society and for communities around the world. How do you approach these thorny issues of ownership and stewardship and who has a right to what objects in a way that goes beyond the law and is guided by ethical principles?

The laws may be good, they may be bad, they may be inadequate, but at least you have a system for going to the courts to try and adjudicate it. As soon as you say of course we want to be legal, but we want to go above being legal and be ethical, then you have to work out what is “ethical.”

People with goodwill coming at this from different backgrounds and experiences and points of view can disagree on that: that's what we  set out to tackle. And hence the project that we're talking about today, the actual embodiment of the project that won honorable mention is a publication called The First Horizon, Understanding the State of Voluntary Repatriation, Restitution, and Reparations Today.

It's our first step in trying to help the museum sector create a new ethical framework to guide how they work with descendant communities to return material, or share stewardship, or to care for the heritage in an appropriate way.  Because that process of change is so hard, that publication tries to do the act of translation of saying to museum people, there's this way of doing this called the Three Horizons Framework, and it's designed for exactly this. You know that the current system isn't really working, a lot of people are unhappy with it for many reasons. Every time people try and change, they run into all these barriers and complexities and hesitations, and they get discouraged because people get angry or they fail, and so you stop there.

Let's talk about how you can get over that by jumping to the Third Horizon, imagining how the world could be better, and using that as a real incentive for people moving forward. I bring to it my own history. My background is in museums. I grew up a museum brat, spending all my time in museums after school and I got a job in a museum right out of graduate school.

The first big job I got was at a collections manager at a natural history museum in 1990. Here in America, 1990 is the year the federal government passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which is called by its acronym, NAGPRA. After only a couple of hundred years, that was the federal government finally saying, maybe we don't have the right to hold sacred objects and funerary objects and human remains, maybe it should go back to the tribes. So good on us for passing the law. But my first year in a natural history museum, I was in some of the very earliest meetings where curators and collections managers were sitting with tribal representatives to talk about how this would work, and the room just reeked with fear and anger. The tribal representatives were angry for very legitimate reasons, that it had taken a federal law to drag people to the table to talk about this. And the museum people were scared that they were going to lose everything. Think about it from their point of view. You grow up loving archaeology, and you study it, and you get your PhD, and you get your dream job at a museum, and you're working as hard as you can to do good research and take really good care of the collections, and somebody comes along and says, “you shouldn't even have that. You need to give it back.” It really upended their world. I remember some colleagues saying. either privately or even in print to the newspapers, “It's going to empty the museum. There won't be anything left in the collections.”

Now, jump forward 35 years now, I'm a futurist as well as a museum person. And it occurred to me, if I could do a little bit of time travel, and go back and replace my then-self in those rooms and say, “Hey, hold on a minute. I want to tell you some stories about what the world's going to be like in 2024.”

“Yes, there is material that has gone back to the tribes (and museums have gotten a lot of praise from the public for doing the right thing). But there are also a lot of tribes that have said, no, we want you to take care of it, but we want to help you understand how to take care of it appropriately and how to treat it in a respectful way.

We know that you want to tell good stories, correct stories, and really understand context. We can tell you a lot about that material that you didn't know. Some of it should be private, and we'll tell you when that’s so, and some of it can be public, and let us help you tell those stories.”

I think that the kinds of stories I could have told those people 35 years ago about how this has turned out. It wasn't an easy road. It isn't a finished road. But there are so many good stories of how those collaborations have been fruitful and productive and positive. I think it could have gotten them over some of that fear and hesitation a lot faster.

Peter Hayward: There's no question, Elizabeth, and it is one of those aspects that we start out, if you've listened to FuturePod, I'm sure you've heard me say, , is that we're not so much futurists as we are presentists. We are trying to be at the best we can be in the present. And we use time to help us be better now. Sohail Inayatullah's Future's Triangle, which talks about the weight of the past, holding both responsibility and grief. That the grief has to be managed, otherwise we can't go to a better future. At the same time, the importance of the past has to come with us, otherwise we can't get to a better future. And so tied up in these very abstract concepts of time, there's real personal emotional connections that matter to people and what you described sitting around those rooms back in 1990 was people there were in different time spaces, sitting in different emotional spaces and using the imagined future, the improved future, the future that we hope for doesn't resolve everything, but as you say, it gives people courage to go forward.

Elizabeth Merritt: And I hope, Peter, it helps them focus on the real issues. When I'm explaining this issue to non-museum people, one example I often use, because so many people have read about it, are the Parthenon marbles. Back and forth for decades, Greece saying they should be returned from Britain to Greece because they belong here and Lord Elgin didn't have the right to buy them from, was it the Turks, and bring them back.

If you talk to a British museum person, one of the first thing they'll say is “we can't give them back because there's a law saying British museums can't give it back.” One of the things I love about a futures approach is you can say, okay, let's pretend that it happened. You're living in 2035 and you're telling me the story of what had to happen for that return to take place.

What's one of the things that would have had to change? And one would say, the law must have been changed. Bingo. I'm not saying it's easy, but that's something that happens: laws get passed. Laws get changed. So as soon as you turn that from being the end of the argument--“You can't, it's against the law,”--then you can start talking about the other more complicated issues.

Peter Hayward: Yeah, and that's the point, to start the conversation rather than suspend the argument. And that's what you're trying to do is, people have to, if people have to defend their past, then you're not going to go very far if their point is I'm here to defend myself and similarly, if you come forward saying I suffered in the past and I want retribution, I want punishment, I want something, if that's where you're starting from, then again, we have to have processes for dealing with present hurt, present defensiveness, you describe the love that people have for these pieces, the care they've taken of them The emotions that people have around objects, places, the past themselves, are real and have to be managed, otherwise we can't move forward.

Elizabeth Merritt: Absolutely, and I love what you said about getting over the hurt and grief. One of the things that informed my thinking about this was looking at the work of truth and reconciliation commissions across the world, in Canada, in South Africa. Here in the U. S., even the little state of Vermont has created its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Even though not all museums collect, really the heart of museums, are the objects they take care of. And I like to say, one of the reasons museums are so central to society is because those objects hold our memories and our stories, and they have these bigger meanings. These issues of what is truth, what is reconciliation, how do you make reparations for past harm are bound up in the stories attached to those objects.

When I talk to people representing descendant communities and to museum people about what reparations would look like, when you explain we're not just talking about monetary reparations and who might pay who (which is mostly an issue for the national level or the states), one of the first things they talk about is telling reparative stories.

One of the harms that museums did and perpetuated was to speak about indigenous people as if they were only in the past. You could go to a museum and feel like, oh, they're all gone, here's a frozen slice of time of these people living in the early 1800s and now they must be gone because you don't see any depictions of them as modern people wearing jeans and going to McDonald's.

One of the first things that Indigenous people said to museums was “tell better stories. We're still here. Tell the stories of what we're like today. And when you tell our histories, ask us because some of the histories that are written down, histories written by the victors, they're not always accurate.”

It isn't always about the objects, but it often is. Feelings and stories get tangled up with the objects, and of course, for many of the communities we're talking about, those objects are not inanimate objects, they have lives and spirits of their own.

Peter Hayward: We are seeing museums of the future pop up, both as specific museums and also aspects of universities. We've got one in Australia based in Adelaide, which is a wonderful thing. It's at one of the universities called MOD and I see the way that these museums of the future are there specifically to create a conversation now to use the future in order to have more civic, deeper, more respectful conversations in the present. And I wonder whether you've got any thoughts on the way that museums could use future more to have their conversations about relationships with the past and culture.

Elizabeth Merritt: Thank you for asking that.

One of my passions is collecting examples of museums that do futurist exhibits. I had the pleasure of working with the DoSeum in San Antonio a few years ago, as they plan to celebrate San Antonio's, 500th birthday by helping kids imagine what San Antonio could be like 500 years from now.

That was mind blowing. Trying to learn how to talk to kids about the future that far off was fun. And you also have museums that are like helping people think about really scary, difficult issues like climate change. by helping them live in the future that climate change might create. I think it both helps them realize the gravity of the situation, but also helps them manage their fear.

Because when people are fearful, they block out the issue. They don't want to deal with it. If you can embody it, you can make it seem like something manageable, make people realize “I could live with that.” I think it's a sleight of hand, like a magician's trick. When it's done well, museums often present issues as if they were in the future, when really they're giving permission to people to think about the present without feeling so fraught about it.

Peter Hayward: I think the other thing too, which is that, again, we're put, where the future seems fearful, different, changed, whatever, we, I think the natural human response is to almost go to the collapse mode. That therefore, we won't survive, the world will end. And the other beauty of the past is to look back at how other changes we've managed and we've adapted and we're still here.

So back to your point, for all the things you've done to us, we're still here. There is this innate sense of resilience in both people's culture. The stories that we want to tell is how we cope and that to me is the essence of what The Three Horizons is doing for you. You're saying, look, we can't see how to get there, but the messy bit in the middle is also where the stories come from about what we've done.

Elizabeth Merritt: I see that playing out. The next stage in our project is we're inviting 15 or so people from around the world to write stories. Could be an academic paper, could be flat out speculative fiction describing their version of the preferred future. If you go to a future in which you asked somebody from an indigenous tribe or somebody who's descendant from people who are enslaved in America, or Jews whose family had been displaced and robbed during the Holocaust, “so how do you feel about museums?” their answer would be positive. “Yes, museums really support our culture and help us retain and preserve who we are. They're real partners in the process of being a living community.”

What does that look like? When I talk to people about this project and explain what I'm inviting them to write, sometimes it takes a while for them to wrap their heads around the fact that I'm not asking them to write about their current work. Especially if they're academics, the first thing they jump to is, Oh, I could write a great case study of this work I did.

And I say, that's wonderful! But, that's not what we're doing right now. We want you to turn on your imagination and tell us what you wish the world would be. The way I got this across was to say, when you write me a description of the paper you want to write, start by completing the following sentence: “A future in which….” For example, we talked to a repatriation researcher at Te Papa Tongarewa, which is the National Museum of New Zealand. And she said, I'm going to explore a future in which repatriation is completed, and we've moved on to working to tell the stories of removal, theft, and accession and subsequent restoration and redress. We've gotten over this really hard part of getting this stuff back, and now it's not easy. It's not nirvana, we haven't reached utopia, but we've gotten to the part where we're saying now, what's next?

We have an anti-disciplinary artist and experience designer who is from Trinidad and Tobago, who's going to write a piece of speculative fiction, a mystery set in the future in which the descendants of people who were enslaved in the US are working together with communities in Africa to use stories in hidden histories and the spiritual value of stolen artifacts to reconnect their communities, to bring them together again after having been separated by enslavement. So how can museums help facilitate this process of social and spiritual repair?

 

Peter Hayward: Elizabeth, so far you've come, it's fantastic, but what comes after that?

Elizabeth Merritt: Of course, the thing about the Three Horizons framework is there are three horizons,

This part of the project that we've published is the first part: What are the signals suggesting things are changing? What is the case for accelerating that process and diving in now? Now we're engaged in the third horizon, helping people tell these optimistic stories of the future to inspire people to make change.

And then we have the hard work of helping them tackle the second horizon. I'm already thinking about how to teach museums about backcasting and about how the technique of “remembering the future” can help you come up with solutions that you can't see when the barrier is right in front of you. If you can get up in the air and look down on it from a perspective, you can find your way through all the complexities of the barriers.

Peter Hayward: Awesome. Look, this has been a wonderful chat. Again, congratulations for the Special Mention. Deserved. And thank you too for spending some time with the FuturePod community.

Elizabeth Merritt: Thank you, Peter. It's been an honor.

Peter Hayward:  I hope you enjoyed my conversation today with Estefania and Elizabeth. A pair of masterful practitioners who both used futures tools to help other people do their best work. And to also wrestle with difficult challenges. And I will let John close this podcast out. I'll see you next time.

John Sweeney: Hi, everyone. Keep an eye out for the Association of Professional Futurists call for submissions for the IF Awards come August.

If you have a futures project you're working on or considering, this is a fantastic opportunity to share it with the APF and the broader futures and foresight community. The IFF Awards recognize excellence in futures and foresight work across nine themes, such as impact, imagination, and indigenous. Stay tuned for insights from past winners published in Compass, And the upcoming APF membership events.