Backcasting for Future: What anticipation practices for cultural projects?

Workshop (1h30) in-person, in Bienne (CH)

Method : Backcasting

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The Forum Danse is the annual meeting of Swiss dance professionals, bringing together choreographers, dancers, cultural mediators, programmers, subsidisers, production and touring managers to discuss cultural policy and current issues in the profession. The 2023 edition will focus on the question of "Artistic Processes - Safe Spaces". The Dance Forum is co-organised by Reso - Dance Network Switzerland, Danse Suisse and Pro Helvetia.

Backcasting for Future:

What anticipation practices for cultural projects?

Workshop: 1h30, 1.11.23

Every project begins with an ideal future in view, which sometimes also leads to underestimating the difficulties that may arise.

But what you don't anticipate, you can't avoid either.

Then implementating the project uncover realities that are sometimes quite different from the initial objectives. At the end of the process, however, the objectives must be met, otherwise the next project or one's credibility could be compromised.

This workshop looks at cases provided by participants where a project (creative, curatorial or promotionnel) has not gone, or ended, well.

Using "backcasting" (retrospective vision), we look back to see what other avenues could have been taken to achieve the desired future: if we had known the outcome of the process in advance, what could we have done differently?

The aim here is to offer a space for (inter)personal reflexion, followed by a collective examination of what might be useful anticipatory reflexes and practices in cultural projects.