Future 14b: The Cage of Bureaucracy, a Map of Gentrification and Spaces of Potentiality
The exhibition Picture (a) City displays works of art that depict and critically reflect on various periods in the life of the city of Ljubljana. The exhibition curated by Igor Španjol also features the Future 14b Collective installation The Cage of Bureaucracy, a Map of Gentrification and Spaces of Potentiality.
- Group exhibition
+MSUM, Ljubljana, 30. 1.–1. 6. 2025
Conceptual design of the installation and public interventions: Olja Grubić, Ida Hiršenfelder, Tea Hvala, Andrej Koruza, Rok Kranjc
Support: Alja Lobnik
Stage design: Toni Soprano Meneglejte
Producer: Nastja Kotnik
Production: Maska Ljubljana
In partnership with: Krater Creative Lab, +MSUM Moderna gallery
Who will pick up the tab?
Who will pick up the tab?
Three interventions – three opportunities to sow the seeds of Future 14b
The interventions are part of the exhibition Picture (a) City, which is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM) until June 1st this year.
Saturday, April 5 from 11:00 to 12:30
Thursday, April 24 from 17:00 to 18:30
Friday, May 16 from 17:00 to 18:30
Meeting point: +MSUM (Metelkova) reception
The emissaries from the Future 14B ask for your help. We travelled back to the past to create the conditions for our future and have thus come full (causal) circle.
Join us in three public interventions to find out to what extent we can intervene in reality and how our city streets, buses, and cafés can shortly transform into a testing ground for enacting post-capitalist alternatives. Utopia as a method – unplanned journey through the city (dérive) as a strategy – economy as play.
Each time we will meet at the reception of +MSUM and then go to the second floor, to the iron cage of bureaucracy surrounded by an an archive of relics from a future past. From there, carrying the collective memory of a future that has not yet occurred, we will embark on a dérive through the city in search of universal basic coffee. We will converse as if Future 14b were already here, a drifting bubble amid capitalist realism, subtly sowing fiction into reality with the help of our relics—perhaps even convincing others to join us and expand our bubble further.
We will conclude our journey in one of Ljubljana’s cafés that has so far successfully resisted gentrification, continuing our conversation over a drink paid for with a universal basic services card.
Come hijack the future with us. All you need is curiosity and openness.
- The Cage of Bureaucracy
Future 14B is rooted in degrowth, ecofeminism, and interspecies justice. These principles were first put into action in the abandoned construction pit in Ljubljana’s Bežigrad district, which is now anaged by the Crater Collective who claimed it as their home a year ago.
The iron cage exhibited in +MSUM serves as a meeting point between the present and Future 14B.
In the Future 14B, it will stand as a brutalist monument to the bureaucracy of the capitalist past. In the present, however, the cage –– temporarily on loan from Crater –– serves as a living symbol of precarity, underpaid creative work, and the everyday struggle for survival. Crater, whose existence would be impossible without a solidarity economy, is an embodiment of the idea that spaces can be inhabited in alternative ways.
The cage is surrounded by an anarchive of objects documenting the long struggle for authentic welfare economics of the Future 14B. The exhibited artefacts include smart cards for universal basic income, postcapitalist contracts of employment, and other traces of past quasi-utopian models, each with a particular pitfall of its own.
- A map of gentrification and spaces of potentiality
The emissaries from Future 14B ask for your help. We travelled back to te past in order to create the conditions for our future and have thus come full causal circle.
Our installation includes an empty map of Ljubljana which needs to come to life with your help. We ask you to write in the name, address, and price of a cup of coffee in your favourite café. Why do this? Apart from confirming the age-old truth that the rise in the price of a cup of coffee coincides with the rise in gentrification, your estimates will allow the emissaries to establish that they/we have come to the right timeline, just fucked up enough to be ripe for a revolution. Secondly, places with affordable coffee prices nourish the collective spirit. They are proof of the ingeniousness of the recariat who will always land on its feet, even if this involves a three-hour drive to enjoy an affordable cup of coffee. The emissaries claim that it is in these cafés that conversations are held, alliances forged, and pathways made to the Future 14B.
- A series of public interventions: “Who will pick up the tab?”
In April and May we invite you to join the emissaries on their way to pockets of Future 14B already inhabiting the city — to cafés where coffee is still a basic good, even though it is no longer clear who picks up the tab; but at least it is clear who is drinking it. But this is more than a coffee pilgrimage –– it is an opportunity for discussion, socialising, and co-creating foundations for a different world. On our way, we will explore issues such as access to basic goods, community, and solidarity. Our travels will be filled with humour, irony, and perhaps despair — but in the end, we will settle our tab with a debit card for universal basic services, offering a glimmer of hope that alternatives do exist. All you need to bring along is curiosity and openness. The coffee and travel expenses are on us. The exact locations and travel schedule will be announced at a later date.
