Bartosz Frąckowiak:

Just returned from the incredible The CoMuseum Conference in Athens where I had the privilege of conducting a masterclass on futures scenarios of museums and art institutions through 2050. Let me share four particularly intriguing visions that emerged from our work (with Katarzyna Figiel) with Polish institutions in partnership with FutureEverything and were inspiring starting points for the masterclass activities:

‘In a world where museums transformed into homeless brands while their buildings, collections and resources formed a shared pool of common goods, cultural programs are drawn like lottery tickets, and art has finally freed itself from political influence – paradoxically thanks to algorithms and trust tokenization.’

‘In the museum of the future, where artificial intelligence learned to translate human thoughts into the language of other species, a new form of symbiosis between humans and nature emerged, though excessive expansion of living building elements led to the first human workers’ strike in history.’

‘In post-war trauma times, museums split into two worlds – an official system of apparent neutrality supervised by ethics specialists who carefully filter out controversial content, and an underground of identity enclaves operating through crowdfunding, where each social bubble maintains its own definition of truth.’

‘In the era of fully digital museums, physical masterpieces were locked away in storage, accessible only to the wealthy who can rent entire institutions, while the rest of society experiences art through advertisement-laced virtual projections.’

During the ‘Inclusive Futures’ panel, brilliantly moderated by Tom Fleming, I had engaging discussions with Epaminondas Christophilopoulos, PhD and Elena Mavromichali about how trust-building in institutions is an infinite, non-linear process that can actually arise from conflictual practice rather than consensus.

The visit to EMST was particularly inspiring. I was deeply moved by two exhibitions part of their WHAT IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD? cycle. Penny Siopis’s first major European retrospective ‘For Dear Life’ showcases 50 years of work exploring body politics, grief, and shame in South Africa. Meanwhile, Bertille Bak’s ‘Mineur Mineur’ installation – five synchronized videos showing children in mines across the global South, transforming spaces of exploitation into unexpected playgrounds – offers a poignant reflection on resilience and the complexities of global labor.

Huge thanks to the CoMuseum team – Maria Papaioannou, Sofia Chandaka, Dina Ntziora and Eleni Zacharopoulou – for creating such a thought-provoking space for dialogue about the future of museums. Special thanks to Ewa Kozik and Ewa Ayton from the British Council Poland team for making the project possible. 

My participation in the CoMuseum Conference in Athens was made possible thanks to the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polish Culture Worldwide program.