Photography by Carlos Barradas

How to address something that does yet not exist, as intangible as the future? Indeed, what is the future, for whom and under what circumstances? Is it a uniform and homogenous entity or, on the contrary, there are multiple futures, often diverging ones? This work explores some of these questions in a specific territory, the city of Braga. To that purpose, I have asked ChatGPT whom and what was contributing to enact different futures and/or foresee how were these futures unfolding. This revealed several conceptions of what the future is, or the futures are, for what was not so long ago the future, in this case AI. As such, this work became a portal to Braga’s different and sometimes competing futures through the diverse ways of navigating the present. It intends to reimagine our relationship with these fragmented futures by calling into action linear and nonlinear notions of time and temporalities, through science, religion and spirituality, tradition, health, education and migration flows. These are entangled and permeated by the collectives to which we belong, to the identities we share, to the maps and local cosmologies through which we move. Going a step further, I have requested ChatGPT to tell me how to make the photograph that would deal with that specific future, asking for composition, light, depth of field, and pose, among the other usual photographic rules. In that sense, I intended to keep my artistic agency while dealing and negotiating, with the inevitable new future- become-present AI— a curatorial approach of sorts. With this work, I intended to question the mechanisms through which we activate and configure the futures that are the most meaningful to us.