Counter Visuality Futures Lab and the politics of imagination

We live in an era of polycrisis – and also in an era of imagination crisis. On the one hand, real risks: climate disruption, inequality, conflict, institutional fragility, informational violence. On the other hand, the dominance of catastrophic narratives that narrow the horizon, reducing the future to a sequence of threats and reducing imagination to defensive reaction. This is not an argument for ignoring facts or indulging in comforting escapism. It is an argument for recognising that without the ability to create alternatives – without prototyping other models of reality – we lose agency. Under conditions of emergence and uncertainty, agency is not control; it is the ability to create meaning, direction, and room to act without certainty.

This is why Futures Design Lab also functions as a practice of imagination – working from micro-improvements to systemic redesign, sometimes at social, infrastructural, and even planetary scales. We collaborate with companies, NGOs (including international ones), and public institutions because a broad coalition of actors is needed to experiment with futures responsibly, without naivety. In this sense, prototyping alternatives is a political act in the best meaning of the word: it expands the space of decision, and reduces dependency on futures “installed” by dominant interests.

Counter Visuality Futures Lab: new images, new archetypes, non-hegemonic futures

One of our key methods is the Counter Visuality Futures Lab: a practice of creating non-hegemonic images of the future. We start from the premise that future images are not neutral. They reproduce hierarchies, carry colonial assumptions about development, normalise particular models of “progress,” and render other possibilities invisible. When dominant futures are produced by narrow interest groups, collective imagination becomes an inequality system—shaping real decisions in technology, economics, and governance.

Counter Visuality Futures Lab therefore develops new figures and archetypes of the future, new narrative patterns, and new aesthetics that expand the repertoire of the possible—more plural, more non-colonial, more attentive to diverse epistemologies and lived experiences, and at the same time critically rigorous rather than utopian. It is a practice of surfacing assumptions, disarming them, and redesigning them into futures that are less violent, less extractive, and more just.

Beyond fear politics: securitisation as a machine for producing vulnerabilities

A particularly urgent domain is the politics of fear and the widespread logic of securitisation. “Security” has become a dominant language for describing reality: more and more aspects of life are framed as risky and therefore requiring control. Under such conditions, it becomes easier to expand surveillance, limit rights, legitimise exceptional measures as permanent infrastructure, and normalise technological governance that would otherwise be contested.

The problem is that many securitisation systems do not close the world of risk; they reproduce it. Each new security layer generates new vulnerabilities – technical, institutional, and social – becoming the justification for the next layer of control. The result is a spiral where safety remains an unfulfilled promise, while the costs are borne in autonomy, freedom, and the capacity to experiment with alternative futures.

This spiral contributes to what can be described as an emerging techno-authoritarian complex: an entanglement of interests, technologies, and governance practices that feeds on fear because fear simplifies consent. When communities are governed through anxiety, they become easier to control: more willing to surrender rights, accept invasive infrastructures, and tolerate shrinking civic space. Fear also has a second effect: it paralyses imagination. It narrows futures into defensive scenarios, closes the space of alternatives, and weakens the collective capacity to design otherwise.

For us, working with imagination is therefore not a “soft add-on” to strategy. It is a precondition of agency. Moving beyond fear does not mean denying risk; it means building languages, images, and practices that allow societies and organisations to see more than threats. Designing alternative archetypes and counter-hegemonic images becomes a form of resilience: it restores movement in a world increasingly disciplined by technological “cordons” and a permanent state of defensive anticipation.