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The Mexico learning lab was developed and implemented by WFSF Vice-President for the Iberam Region, Ph.D. Guillermina Baena Paz and the young futurist Alethia Berenice Montero. The project was set up in a partnership with the Direction Ejecutiva de Trabajo del System Penitenciario del Distrito Federal in Mexico City. Nine women held in prison and likely to return to their communities the following year, participated in the project. The women participated in 50 hours of workshops from March till June 2015. The approach chosen for this workshop was “Teatro del devinir” or “Forward theatre”, a performative futures strand. Alethia studied psychology and works as an artist and futurist in the domain of “Forward Theater”, working with performative futures. She is currently studying a Masters in Humanist Body Psychotherapy. She works as a Psychofuturartist and has developed the Psychoprospective Theory along with the Colombian psychologist Martha Jaramillo. She is the pioneer of Forward Theatre in Latin America, and a member of the WFSF Youth Council. Photo: Alethia Berenice Montero, Mexico, speaking at the 21st WFSF World Conference, Bucharest. © 2013 Bram Goots with permission. The objective of the learning lab was to equip the women about to be released into society with tools for reintegration and to prepare them for the challenging future possibilities they might have to deal with upon their return to their communities. This way the course sought to add a self transformative model to the traditional social reintegration model. The learning lab focused exclusively on personal futures but also included some …

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Follow Up – 2015 Congo Fellowship In 2015, one year after the completion of the pilot programme, fitfteen individual artists based in Lubumbashi participated in MAONO, the development education project to which the 2012-2013 LEALA local project was connected. The  images of the future produced over the course of the three year project, were presented at an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Antwerp. The participating students’ were offered an opportunity to provide additional material to be included in the overview. The artists were asked to provide updates of the work they had created. To build on the efforts of the previous years, one artisit participant was selected for the LEALA fellowship. Jean Katambayi, was the beneficiary of this fellowship which helped him to further develop the work he had produced with the LEALA students in Lubumbashi. Jean Katambayi was present at the opening of the exhibition in May 2015. He was accompanied by the two Agence Future volunteers based in Belgium who ran the LEALA project of the previous biennium. The artist had the opportunity to further develop his future related work and share it with arts-minded audiences in Belgium in formal workshops and presentations as well as a range of informal meetings. During his three-week stay in Belgium Jean also worked on a new piece related to the history of mining in the DRC. This piece, called Sol-Sur-Sol, emphasizes how layer upon layer of factors and facts from the past and the present, provide a tiered …

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