Average folk might have all kinds of questions about the World Economic Forum and what goes on there, but for two visionary women, the question was clear: where are all the artists?
For such a high-profile gathering of world leaders, thought leaders, and business leaders, how could there be no room for authentic creativity?
That burning inquiry inevitably led them to ask: if Klaus Schwab can organize a conference in a beautiful Swiss town and try to plan the future of human society, shouldn’t artists help expand that vision, bringing bold perspectives, fresh imagination, and the soul, story, and spirit of our time to the decision-making tables?
The Future of Humanity Experience, recently concluded across five locations in Basel during Art Basel Week, could be styled as a complementary expansion of what was inaugurated in Davos earlier this year. Hosted, energized, and enlivened through art and collaboration, four full-day events unfolded, each gathering a new constellation of 40 co-creators from diverse disciplines and from all corners of the globe to co-create a shared vision of the future.
Artists and organizers Iwona Fluda and Murièle ‘Solange’ Bolay put together the whole event in roughly 4 months, guided by a shared understanding of the scope and character of the project that almost never needed to be explained or spoken aloud.
Speaking to American media for the first time since the successful event launch during ArtBasel, the two women document their remarkable journey and success in creating what may become one of the most hotly anticipated conferences in Europe.
Meeting in the ‘Under Davos
“I have been to Davos during the World Economic Forum 4 times at least, and I felt that creatives and artists are not represented there,” said Iwona, originally from Poland. “There is a type of void and missing space.”
“How come in this huge arena of world leaders, politicians, entrepreneurs, business people and investors there’s very little creativity or creative output visible?”
Solange, who has been attending the WEF on and off since 2007, recalls a different energy back then.
“In my opinion, it was very different then than what it is now. It was a lot more exclusive to attend the inner programs,” she told GNN. “Now, the village area has opened up to a much broader audience, and that’s where more conscious, less transactional conversations start to flow.”
According to her, Davos village is now the largest circle and what attracts the most independent thought leaders and entrepreneurs during WEF Week today. It’s also where the two women, who met through entrepreneur chats, curated an art exhibition that offered a glimpse of what stages like Davos could become if artists and creatives were given a place in the spotlight.
Originally proposed in Davos, their Future of Humanity Art Walk was a resounding success, reaching over 300,000 people worldwide, welcoming 4,000 on-site visitors, and featured artists from all continents, ranging in age from 6 to 85. With just seven weeks of preparation, what began as a small passion project quickly evolved into a full-blown immersive experience and event week during Art Basel.
“With my company MSB & Partners, we’ve been doing business transformations for over 18 years, and for the past 2.5 years, we’ve started incorporating art into these transformation processes.” Solange says. The paintings not only help inspire new ways of thinking and problem solving, she says, but act as an “anchor”, reinforcing that transformative mindset among company employees.
By Solange’s estimation, most enterprising activities focus on predicting certain trends, gravitating towards mega trends, and then somewhere in between products and services arrive on the market, a process she describes as “very brainy and calculated.”
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“It’s a transactional focus versus an explorational one where we design the world we want to see.” In the case of the Future of Humanity Experience, co-designing a world was a notion both women had arrived at independently: with society changing so fast, what kind of world do we want to live in?
“We both have worked in different setups… internally in organizations; externally, as consultants, as business owners, and for me personally it was always the question about how can we really co-create things together without fighting against each other?” Fluda said.
“There really wasn’t time to think about it too much,” Solange remembers. “We were just in action mode and we were kind of ‘guided’ by a vision, that we never really spoke about, but we seemed to have and it was a very special time.”
The Future of Humanity Experience
The bootstrapped and crowdsourced events were a whirlwind 9 months of envisioning, organizing, partaking in, and debriefing after the most recent Future of Humanity Experience in Basel.
“How I operate is more like, ‘oh, there is an idea’—just this little spark. ‘I align with that, I feel like there is so much more we can do, how about we run the 1st sprint and see if it sticks?,’” Fluda told GNN. “That’s kind of my approach for anything. And then, if it does, as in this case, surprisingly, it did, then what else can we do with that?”
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Some 100 artists from all around the world—from Trinidad and Tobago to China—submitted works for the exhibitions.
A week of enjoying curated art shows, presentations, open forums, and exquisite catered lunches left this reporter exhausted, but with a distinct feeling that Iwona and Solange had struck a chord with the very fabric of Western society.
The advent of the internet has seen the metaphorical ‘public square’ distributed online, while the traditional forums of our time: the corner cafe, the library, the bookstore, the townhall—have lost their relevance.
Academia’s trend towards hyper-specialization dampens cross-disciplinary dialogue; the behavior of our public intellectuals gradually came to be governed by social media engagement, and the rise of the digital influencer means that from travel, to fitness, to history and politics, topics are examined almost exclusively at the surface level.
The curated exhibitions at the Future of Humanity Experience were powerful. The themes they explored were broad and impactful, but even if an attendee has never visited an art gallery in their lives, what the event offers is the ‘forum’ as it may have been in our ancestors’ day. Here was a chance to discourse with mastery and enterprise from all over the professional world, and for the noblest of aims—co-creating a vision of the future we’d all like to see.
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“I was there as a business person,” Solange says remembering her first art exhibit in Under Davos, “no one knew who created those pieces.”
“So I was able to listen to the conversations that happened in front of these canvases, and it was so interesting because it’s exactly the conversations that we want to hear happening, you know, in the boardrooms.”
After a successful launch, their outlook is broad and bright. Fluda and Solange perceive the future of the Future of Humanity Experience to be more than just an art exhibit, but a force, a forum, a service, and a community. Next year’s edition can only be bolder.
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