There is a growing awareness that our Western economy is based on overexploitation. It is preying on nature, raw materials and the landscape. The earth and people are literally being exhausted. This overexploitation causes global warming, pollution of the environment and exploitation of large groups of people. It threatens not only human well-being, but has existential consequences for all life. Our capitalist system ignores the consequences of economic progress and promotes lifestyles based on unsustainable consumption and material satisfaction. While economics was for decades the domain of unquestioned theories of scarcity, free market forces and limited government regulation, today most of these theories are virtually obsolete.

The economy is the housekeeping of the earth that we conduct together. It is the fabric of agreements, traditions, value systems and relationships between the individual and the collective, human nature and technology that gives shape to the economy. In recent decades the economy has become increasingly central to our thinking and actions. As if everything begins with economics, instead of everything being reflected in the form of our economy. Future of Work investigates the relationship between people and economy through ideas and stories, fact and fiction, myths and monsters, in order to better understand and re-appropriate the subject of economics.

Future of Work Foundation is a hybrid platform for artistic research and co-creation under the artistic leadership of Olga Mink and Godelieve Spaas. The platform questions the economic system from an ideological and an everyday perspective by making proposals for acting differently, making different choices and telling new stories about economics. It brings about new forms of collaboration and sustainable strategies around work and economy, and proposes visions and stories to stimulate dialogue about what the economy looks like when our needs become secondary to the demands for a healthy ecosystem and a just society.

The Future of Work program was created in collaboration with Willem Twee, Huis 73, Social Label, Academie voor Beeldvorming, Baltan Laboratories, FairWork, RUW, The100Hands, Werkwarenhuis, Avans Hogeschool, Gemeente ’s-Hertogenbosch, ConstructLab, Our New Economy and Rabo Art Lab.