Join us for Ignacio Navas’ Open Studio, our newest resident at the FUTURES Hub. Ignacio Navas will present his project “ORACLE” as part of the FUTURES Residency.
Ignacio works at the intersection of photography, data, and emerging technologies. His practice transforms everyday images into computational, generative, and interactive systems that reveal how political, economic, and social forces shape the world around us.
"ORACLE is a computational photographic project that reimagines Luigi Ghirri’s Atlante within the financial landscape. Where Ghirri used macro views of an atlas to read the world—describing mountains, cities, oceans, and deserts as a system of signs—ORACLE recontextualises this logic by shifting its focus to bank notes, turning emblems, portraits, seals, numerals, and national symbols into omens of market tensions, corporate expectations, and speculative finance." - Ignacio Navas -
Event details
4 February 2026 | 17:00 – 20:00
FUTURES Photography Hub, Isaac Titsinghkade 6A, B, 1018 CA Amsterdam
Processing Workshop | 17:00 to 18:30
An introductory session led by Ignacio covering the basics of Processing and its creative use in photography and art. We will explore key libraries, simple workflows and the vibe coding approach, then unpack the making of ORACLE.
No experience required.
Open Studio | 18:30 to 20:00
Drop in to meet Ignacio, see the outcomes of the residency and join a short conversation about the project.
Please RSVP by 3 February 2026 to confirm your attendance.
This Open Studio is Supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK).
Need feedback on a photo project?
Intersecciones × Wanderstories will host a peer-to-peer feedback session at the FUTURES Hub for the first time.
The session is open to visual storytellers, artists, and students at any stage of their project, from early ideas to finished work.
Bring your project, small prints or a laptop, and share it in a supportive, collaborative setting.
EVENT DETAILS
2 February 2026 | 18:30–21:00
FUTURES Photography Hub
Isaac Titsinghkade 6A, B, 1018 CA Amsterdam
We look forward to seeing you there!
About Wanderstories
Wanderstories is a peer-to-peer feedback community for photographers and visual storytellers, hosted in partnership with Fotodok Utrecht. They meet regularly to share works in progress, exchange constructive feedback, and encourage dialogue through photobooks, films, and conversations around creative practice. Wanderstories provides a supportive space to gain new perspectives and grow as a visual artist.
About Intersecciones
Intersecciones is a peer-to-peer project-sharing format initiated by Ignacio Navas, FUTURES artist in residence, together with other photographers. It operates through El Local, an independent photography space in Madrid, where Intersecciones takes place weekly as an open forum for sharing and discussing ongoing projects.
Please join us for the first FUTURES x Magnum Artist Spotlight of 2026 with Marcus Gustafsson.
Marcus Gustafsson will present his first photo-book, Filling the Gaps, published by Kultbooks.
In his debut book Gustafsson explores a deeply personal and complex narrative about his father’s alcoholism and its impact on himself and his family. The project reconciles fragmented memories to better understand the circumstances that have shaped his life and relationships, while also serving as an effort toward healing and reconnecting with his fractured family.
It confronts the duality of growing up with an alcoholic parent—the struggle to break free while remaining bound by a shared history—and the void left behind when the family’s unifying figure is gone. The work examines how addiction alters family dynamics, leaves lasting marks, and challenges the possibility of moving forward.
In Filling in the Gaps, Marcus combines his own images with archival family photographs. His visual language is raw yet stylized, documenting his father’s daily life and surroundings while also turning the camera toward himself, reflecting the tension between reality and memory. Altered family photos—taped or drawn over—become acts of reclamation, as he infuses inherited memories with his own voice. Filling in the Gaps is an emotional exploration of trauma, showing how revisiting painful memories can open paths toward reconciliation and peace with the past.
About FUTURES x Magnum Artist Spotlight:
Five times a year, Magnum Learn invites a FUTURES photographer to take the spotlight in an online conversation about their artistic journey. The series connects audiences worldwide with the artist’s practice, inspirations, and the ideas behind their work.
We also hope to inspire the next generation of photographers, providing them with the opportunity to connect with fellow artists.
Free – Registration required
“In the Alzou Valley once flowed a unique queer community devoted to the river deity. They were fluid beings; the valley and the river breathed with them - a world where queerness, nature, and faith intertwined. But the harmony broke, the waters darkened, and the people of Alzou drifted into exile, leaving only whispers in the river’s song.”
Join us for Ugo Woatzi’s Open Studio, our newest residents at the FUTURES Hub, and celebrate the end of the year together!
Ugo Woatzi will present their project l’eau brille aussi la nuit as part of the FUTURES & MPB Residency.
Ugo Woatzi’s practice emerges as an intimate and poetic gesture, weaving the political with the imaginary. Moving through constellations of mediums, speculative fragments, queer theories, collective and personal memories, their work imagines new possibilities for belonging and transformation—both for our bodies and for the worlds we inhabit.
For the artist talk, Ugo Woarzi will be in conversation with Samira Damato, filmmaker, curator and artistic director for the Pride Photo Award.
Event Details:
- 16:00-17:30 – Portfolio sessions
- 17:30 - Open studio starts
- 18:30 – Q&A with Samira Damato
- Studio Open Until: 20:00
- Location: FUTURES Photography Hub, Isaac Titsinghkade 6A, B, 1018 CA Amsterdam
👉 Please RSVP by 9 December 2025 to confirm your attendance.
About the portfolio sessions
As part of the Open Studio, Ugo Woatzi, guest teacher at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, will organize four sessions of portfolio discussion, where the participants will have the opportunity to discuss a variety of topics, such as the development of their practice, what it means to take part in a residency program, how to structure a portfolio. Each session is an open conversation on the different aspects of the creative process, without being focused exclusively on the review of the portfolio.
The sessions will take place between 16:00 and 17:30 at the FUTURES Hub and it will be possible to sign up through the form below. There are four spots available, assigned on a first-come, first-served signup basis.
⚡️ Sign up here for the Portfolio Sessions
About Ugo Woatzi
Ugo Woatzi’s practice emerges as an intimate and poetic gesture, weaving the political with the imaginary. Moving through constellations of mediums, speculative fragments, queer theories, collective and personal memories, their work imagines new possibilities for belonging and transformation—both for our bodies and for the worlds we inhabit.
In 2024, Woatzi was a participant at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, followed by a residency at WIELS, Centre for Contemporary Art in Brussels, in 2025. Woatzi holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and completed studies at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, as well as an MA in Visual Arts at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. Since 2023, they have also been a guest teacher at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.
The opening is part of FUTURES X MPB residency, supported by MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell and trade used photo and video gear.
Supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK).
Photo Credits: Johan Poezevara
FUTURES & Magnum Photos invite you to join us for our next online Artist Spotlight with Vika Eksta.
Eksta’s practice is rooted in the exploration of self-portraits as a method of researching specific themes and creating works that resonate with a wider community.
In this presentation, she will focus on her recent project The Encounter, an attempt to reconstruct the physical and emotional experience of childbirth through photographic self-portraits and video materials captured during the process. She will also address the challenges of exhibiting such intimate work and the ways it has been received by the public.
To provide context for this approach, Eksta will start her talk by reflecting on her earlier self-portrait projects, particularly Dievs Daba Darbs (God Nature Toil). The project examines rural depopulation, using an abandoned house and what it contains as props to tell the wider story. This project was published as a photobook in 2018.
About Vika Eksta:
Vika Eksta (1987) is an artist and educator based in Riga, Latvia.Her work primarily focuses on autobiographical narrative and existential subjects, as well as research of Eastern European life and reflections of historical trauma. Vika works with photography, analogue photo printing, video, performance for the camera and archival research.Her approach embodies the desire of 19th-century Romantic painters to capture what they observe by constructing an entirely new reality - one saturated with emotion, association, and imagery.Since 2014, she has participated in exhibitions in Latvia and abroad, including at the Latvian National Museum of Art, kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Tallin Art Hall, Vilnius National gallery, ALMA gallery, ISSP Gallery, Kaunas Photography Gallery etc. Her work is held in the collections of Latvian National Museum of Art, Latvian Museum of photography, SEB bank, VV foundation and private collections. Vika is the winner of the ADC Young Guns, FK Portfolio and Riga Photography Biennial awards for young Baltic photographers and is part of Futures photography network since 2022. Vika is represented by ALMA gallery.
About FUTURES x Magnum Artist Spotlight:
Every other month, we invite a photographer from the FUTURES platform to join us for an engaging online conversation about their artistic journey. Thanks to the online format, these talks are accessible to audiences around the world, offering a rare opportunity to hear directly from emerging artists about their work, motivations, and creative processes.
This series also aims to inspire the next generation of photographers by connecting them with practitioners who are still in the early stages of their careers—offering valuable insights and inspiration for others navigating similar paths.
Free – Registration required by following this link
© Vika Eksta
FUTURES Foundation is excited to announce a new partnership with Paris Photo and Carte Blanche. As supporting partner, FUTURES will collaborate with the Carte Blanche program to provide the students finalists and the laureates with a curated educational program. The partnership will also include the possibility for one of the Carte Blanche laureates to participate in the FUTURES Residency Program in Amsterdam.
FUTURES will be present during Paris Photo 2025 on Friday November 14 at 5 PM at the Carte Blanche booth at the Grand Palais, where we will have the opportunity to meet the finalists and laureates of the Carte Blanche Students program. We are enthusiastic to work together with Paris Photo and welcome the students from the Carte Blanche Program in the FUTURES community.
Join us for a talk and workshop with Michał Sita & Anna Pilawska-Sita, presenting their research The Ontologies of Space – Case Studies of Jeju.
"Recently, thanks to an invitation from the Jeju Museum of Art, we've been working together in South Korea, exploring the tensions embedded in the landscape of Jeju island. Our first focus point was on military structures from the Japanese colonial period—bunkers built deep into volcanic hills. While the surrounding environment may seem largely untouched, these bunkers continue to subtly transform it, bending it to the logic of warfare. Hills become networks of fortresses; forests turn into camouflage. The ecosystem itself becomes part of the military infrastructure, just like the concrete walls and underground corridors. This idea—that architecture acts as a device reshaping what a landscape is and can be—was at the core of the work we presented at the Jeju Biennale last year. We examined the lingering power and impact of postcolonial architecture.
In 2025, we had another opportunity to work in Jeju, focusing on another kind of transformation: the tensions between nature and golf infrastructure, which is widespread across the island. We asked ourselves: what happens to "nature" when it’s shaped by the logic of large-scale country club developments?
Alongside our artistic work, we also conducted a curatorial survey, researching the practices of artists engaged with nature–landscape relationships in Jeju. The process provided us with an understanding of the artistic practices in Jeju that seek to identify the norms guiding usage of space and nature, or propose subversive strategies for defining and acting upon the natural environment.
The open studio will provide us with an opportunity to test the way we revisited the materials we've gathered. During the residency we’ve been working to deepen our collaboration with Korean artists—trying to develop an infrastructure that will enable confronting multiple existing perspectives on the ontology of nature and space in Jeju, and testing new ones."
Event Details:
- 16:30 – Workshop
- 17:30 – Open studio starts
- 18:30 – Talk
- Studio Open Until: 20:00
- Location: FUTURES Photography Hub, Isaac Titsinghkade 6A, B, 1018 CA Amsterdam
⛳️ RSPV HERE
About the workshop:
We can think about the environment through various perspectives, each specific to different organisms or objects. Sometimes, a simple shift in perspective or in how we engage with our surroundings is enough for a landscape to take on new meanings, aligned with a parallel logic. This is precisely how artists working in recent years on the Korean island of Jeju have attempted to rethink their relationship with space — observing it from peripheral positions — through the lens of palm trees, weeds, or historically charged sites of violence. Such exercises in situated awareness have allowed hidden tensions in the relationships between humans, the environment, and the history of a place to surface. We, too, followed this path. We observed how the operation of golf courses on Jeju affects the nature and landscape. Golf has the ability to subject vast areas to the rules of the game, its aesthetics, and the logic of movement characteristic of the sport.
But what practical consequences arise from a shift in how we understand space, if we begin to define it according to the rules of golf? What, for example, will happen to the Futures Hub space if we subordinate it to the logic of a golf ball? During the workshops, we will try to explore this by making provisional changes and adaptations that will allow us to create a functional practice area for golf.
The opening is part of FUTURES X MPB residency, supported by MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell and trade used photo and video kit.
Supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK).
© Michał Sita
FUTURES & Magnum Photos invite you to join us for our next online Artist Spotlight with Lia Darjes.
For this talk, Lia Darjes will present her project Plates I-XXXI, published by Chose Commune in 2024.
The enigmatic guests at Lia Darjes’ banquet seem straight out of a fairy tale. Plates I-XXXI is a silent series in vivid colours that unveils the magic of an unexpected reality.
Squirrels, tits, slugs, field mice, ants, sparrows: these are some of the small animals that become the protagonists of Lia Darjes’ mysterious tale. Far from frightening, they captivate and charm with their furtive spirit.
Plates I-XXXI is a silent, colourful series that lifts the veil to reveal that unexpected visitors and magical parallel worlds are closer than we think. Lia will being her talk by discussing the start of her career, explaining how she transitioned from photojournalism to documentary photography, a journey that ultimately led to the creation of Plates I-XXXI.
About FUTURES x Magnum Artist Spotlight:
Every other month, we invite a photographer from the FUTURES platform to join us for an engaging online conversation about their artistic journey. Thanks to the online format, these talks are accessible to audiences around the world, offering a rare opportunity to hear directly from emerging artists about their work, motivations, and creative processes.
This series also aims to inspire the next generation of photographers by connecting them with practitioners who are still in the early stages of their careers—offering valuable insights and inspiration for others navigating similar paths.
Free – Registration required by following this link
© Lia Darjes
Join us for a talk with Giangavino Pazzola, Curator at Camera-Italian Center for Photography. He will present his research on New Documentary Strategies, developed during his residency in Amsterdam in July.
"Over the last decade, in Italy several experts have interpreted emerging practices in the Italian context as experiences close to the notions of post and metaphotography. However, there has been little attention given to more recent and innovative studies such as Speculative Documentary (Bellinck & van Dienderen, 2019) or New Documentary Strategies (Hamilton, 2021), both active in Northern Europe. These approaches emphasize the aesthetic, political, social, and technological specificities of the medium. The research investigates the photographic production of Italian authors active after 2004 (the year the Flickr website was launched, and art historian Hal Foster published An Archival Impulse) like Lorenzo Vitturi, Arianna Arcara, Federico Clavarino, Marina Caneve, Salvatore Vitale, Silvia Rosi, Karim El Makthafi and more to trace their roots and continuities with previous generations, and to position them within an updated and international critical horizon."
Event Details
Date: Wednesday, 08 October 2025
Walk in: 17.15 -17.30
Workshop: 17.30 -19.00
Talk: 19.00
Studio Open Until: 20:00
Location: FUTURES Photography Hub, Isaac Titsinghkade 6A, B, 1018 CA Amsterdam
About the Workshop
Based on the research made by the curator of CAMERA in the Italian context, NDS is a theoretical-practical workshop in which participants will be asked to apply the idea of playfulness as a metaphor for reading and interpreting contemporary life. A research method and, at the same time, a daily practice for investigating the formation of photographic art practices, NDS is a stimulus to cross the boundaries and limits of the documentary in order to reposition oneself in relation to them and find new meanings and narratives. Exploring the potential of storytelling through images and the use of photography in dialogue with other media like texts, video, performance and sculptures, NDS critically reflects on issues like truth and objectivity nowadays.
Who can attend?
Anyone interested is welcome to participate.
What is needed?
Participants may bring a portfolio if they wish, but it is not required.
This research project is supported by Strategia Fotografia 2024, an initiative of the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity.
Partners Fotodok and Camera-Italian Center for Photography.
Photo Credit: Marina Caneve
The exhibition Ties that Bind opens on October 4 at the Holešovice Market, Hall 11A, in Prague, the last destination after Zagreb and Porto.
The exhibition explores the shifting forms of relationality, belonging, and closeness. Through the works of Dev Dhunsi, Sasha Chaika, Ihar Hancharuk, Donja Nasseri and Sheung Yiu, it examines the ways in which traditional notions of family, identity, and social structures can be re-evaluated and reshaped. Rather than fixed categories, it offers space for open-ended, often contradictory or temporary forms of bonds that form between people, places, and species.
The presented works navigate between personal experience and broader cultural and political contexts. Language, the body, memory, and imagination are presented through photography, installation, text, and performative elements as means of creating bonds as well as disrupting them.The exhibition thus raises questions about what new forms of closeness we can envision and whether it is possible to form relationships beyond established frameworks or at least momentarily challenge these boundaries.
The development of the theme and the selection was curated by the institutions Bienal Fotografia do Porto, Fotogalleriet, Fotograf Zone, and Organ Vida Festival. Ties That Bind exhibition in Prague is curated by Světlana Malina.
Exhibition run: 4 October - 12 October 2025
Location: Holešovice Market, Hall 11A (“The Glasshouse / Skleněnka”), Prague, Czech Republic
More info at https://fotograf.zone/
FUTURES is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Union. The Swiss program is supported by Pro Helvetia.
Credits image Sheung Yiu