Tender Futures

Opening, Friday 04.09.26, 6pm

Guided tour, Saturday, 03.10.26, 2pm

Reading and talk, proposed by Luna Bayard, Saturday, 17.10.26, 4pm

Guest curator: Victor Sala

The exhibition Tender Futures takes solarpunk as its starting point to explore how we can imagine and build possible futures. An artistic movement at the intersection of science fiction, ecology and politics, solar punk offers an optimistic vision of a future based on transforming the ways we live, use technology, and relate to our environment.

Victor Sala, guest curator, has structured the exhibition around three main themes: materiality, alternative practices, and joy. These ideas provide a subjective lens through which to approach the exhibition, with solarpunk as a tool for projection. They reflect an interest in experiments that explore other ways of producing, living and building society. They also express a critical position towards the productionist and capitalist systems that shape contemporary Western society.

The invites artists were selected for practices capable of open up spaces for speculation and new possibilities. The new works created for the exhibition are not presented as definitive answers to environment and social crisis, but rather as experiments and forms of research. Through materials, uses, processes, and imaginaries, they invite us to look differently and explore other ways of building and living.

Tender Futures does not aim to provide an exhaustive or historical overview of solarpunk, does it seek to define of the movement once and for all. Instead, it draws on some of its key principles — particularly low-tech approaches, the revival and sharing of practical knowledge, and the search for alternative models — to develop a perspective rooted in today’s social and political context. Solarpunk thus becomes a meeting point between different artistic practices and the curatorial perspective. It provides a shared framework through which the works can open up a collective reflection on how we live in the present and how we might imagine the futures.

CAN team:
Caroline Bourrit, Martin Jakob, Nicolas Raufaste, Liza Trottet, Sebastian Verdon