FUTURES academic Claire Marshall, who is involved in, and inspired by, the syntropic agriculture and food community of her new neighbourly coastal home in Valla, has created an exhibition entitled ‘Museum of Futures’ Food for Thought’ which she takes to the US in November.

The exhibition presents ten thought provoking ‘works’ that talk about possible futures in food including eating insects, lab grown meat, 3D printed food and more.

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“One of the exhibits, the neighbourhood pantry, will feature home produced food; the kind of relishes and jams we tend to share with our neighbours or give as gifts,” Claire told News Of The Area.

“I’d like to do a call out to the community to see if there are any residents who would like to contribute to the exhibition with their homemade foodstuffs.

“By ‘neighbourhood pantry’ I mean goods made by fellow residents, the things we swap when we are invited over.

“For me it’s rosemary salt, some homemade shrubs, a great non-alcoholic drink, but could also be jams, chutneys, dried fruit etc,” she said.

Claire teaches future thinking at the University of Technology Sydney and as a leading bright mind on the subject she has been commissioned to create exhibitions to provoke thought around what lies ahead of us.

Her Food For Thought theme is the third exhibition in The Museum of Futures collection of exhibitions.

“The idea behind the Museum of Futures comes from some fascinating research into how we think about the future,” said Claire.

“It shows that we tend to ‘lack empathy with our future selves’.

“This has been revealed by some really interesting studies that have shown that the area in our brain that is responsible for thinking about ourselves stops being activated when we think about ourselves five or more years into the future.

“This lack of empathy can lead us to engage in what we call ‘temporal discounting’ or basically making decisions that benefit us in the present over the harm or benefit to us in the future.”

The Museum of Futures tries to increase this empathy by presenting physical objects that are ‘as if from the future’ making it easier to imagine yourself in this future, bringing the future to life, in a way.

So far there are three Museum of Futures exhibitions.

The Future of Work exhibition was commissioned by the City of Sydney.

The second exhibition Pandemic Pivots was created thanks to a cultural and creative grant from City of Sydney and the latest exhibition Food for Thought has been sponsored by Arizona State University.

The exhibitions have toured through NSW and Queensland and will be at NSW Parliament House in July 2023 thanks to an Australia Council Grant.

There is also an online gallery that everyone can access by going to museumoffutures.com

Claire leaves on 11 November for Arizona where the exhibition will be shown as part of the Emerge Festival sponsored by Arizona State University and Mesa Arts Centre.

View the exhibition at https://emerge.asu.edu/2020/exhibits/museum-of-futures/.

To view previous exhibitions, visit https://www.museumoffutures.com/.

To contact Claire with offers from your panty, phone Claire Marshall on 0433 451 000 or email claire@iflabs.com.au.

By Andrea FERRARI