Doors to the Future: Imagining more humane migration futures

'Doors to the Future' is an immersive sonic installation and participatory workshop engaging migration as an endangered conceptual world: a terrain where dominant policy languages of crisis and security eclipse lived, multilingual, and relational knowledge. Developed in Samos, Greece with asylum seekers, lawyers, educators, artists, and humanitarian workers, the project centres voices diminished by border regimes while foregrounding artistic practice itself as a minoritised epistemology capable of generating alternative timelines.
The installation consists of five QR-coded sonic thresholds. Crossing a doorway activates a multilingual sound world (currently in English, Greek, and Amharic) imagining more humane futures in relation to self, others and the natural world. These imagined future worlds align with St. John’s Eve as a liminal threshold between dark/light and past/future as they were created through a speculative design methodology grounded in intergenerational listening: participants first responded to music from their grandparents’ generation, then crafted sonic futures in dialogue with that inherited wisdom. Genealogy here becomes an ethical relation between memory and responsibility—listening back to create forward.
Presented at SAR, the installation/workshop will invite workshop participants to encounter the doors, engage in facilitated dialogue, and create additional visions for humane migration futures.
Exploring how listening and collaborating within artistic encounters can enable listening and collaborating beyond it, 'Doors to the Future' proposes artistic research as speculative, multilingual, and embodied practice for regenerating endangered conceptual worlds and rehearsing futures policy discourse has yet to articulate.