NEWS FROM OTHER FUTURES - May, 2023

In the summer of 2022, Ward Janssen and Manique Hendricks started an artistic co-directorship of Other Futures, with exciting first results: developing new presentation models for the festival, securing first funding, and setting up a new international curatorial collaboration network.

In the spring of 2023, Ward and Manique have stepped down from their role as artistic co-directors due to the fact that their individual projects outside of Other Futures demand all their attention and dedication. In consultation with the board of Other Futures, Ward and Manique prefer to create space for a new director or co-directorship that can take Other Futures into its third festival edition, alongside the foundation and the community that supports it.

The board of Other Futures would like to thank Ward and Manique for their energy and enthusiasm in the early stages of shaping the festival towards its third edition, and wishes them all the best in their new projects. The search for a new artistic lead will be starting soon.

NEWS FROM OTHER FUTURES - November, 2022

The Board of Other Futures is pleased to announce a new artistic lead team has been appointed to prepare the festival's third edition. Ward Janssen and Manique Hendricks have taken the role of artistic directors of Other Futures; their credentials, experience, and curiosity to explore make them the right team to take Other Futures onwards.

Manique and Ward: ‘We look forward to building on the Other Futures legacy with excited, hungry and curious energy as artistic directors. We will do this as a duo to fully and gladly combine our individual strengths and views on how to explore, through contemporary art, design and philosophy, a future for a more interesting planet that is sci-fi pluriform, fluid, lush and fiercely introspective. That future has the capacity to be empathic, caring and emotionally ambitious. Our collectively lived future can only be founded on ideas that should be fundamentally queer, more fantastical and collaboratively dreamt up by everyone who will live in it. It is an honour to take up this mantle and we cherish the possibility to find out how we will go forth with Other Futures together with the audience, the team, the many artists and thinkers whose visions Other Futures was founded on and built for.’

Ward and Manique started their new role in September and have been working since on their vision for the next edition of the festival, which will take place in Amsterdam in 2024.'  

The new artistic directors will develop the future of the festival from the solid foundation laid by Other Futures founder Brigitte van der Sande, as the founding director and the team of the first two editions of Other Futures.

Christina Li, board member Other Futures: 'Under the visionary leadership of founding director Brigitte van der Sande, Other Futures developed into a thought-provoking multidisciplinary platform that consistently sought for alternative perspectives, and explored urgent themes that are key to our shared existence with a wide community. From the inaugural three-day festival in 2018 that fused speculative fiction with a focus on Africa and the African diaspora, to the recent 2021 edition that drew its attention on Asia and beyond, multi-species thinking and human-nonhuman relations, van der Sande and the team's global and collaborative approach brought non-Western positions to the festival's home city of Amsterdam, raising its profile nationally and internationally. 

We thank her for her tireless dedication to conceiving and cultivating Other Futures, and wish her success in her future endeavours.’