Daniel Arsham on Making Films About the Future

“The film is about the future. In some ways the timing of this particular section is very appropriate, considering the climate summit which is happening in Paris right now, because the film touches on issues around the sea levels rising as a sort of fictional scenario which hopefully will not occur. It explores both this event, this cataclysmic event, and its aftermath, and how we solve that problem.

“The idea for the film originally started with these cast objects that I’ve been making, Future Relic objects. About six years ago I was on Easter Island with some archaeologists who were helping me to understand how they piece together narratives of the past, and I started thinking about how I could do the same thing, but project it forward. I did that by taking objects which we all know, and have an understanding of, but altering their materiality by changing them into crystal or ash. I’ve been thinking about how I can build a world around these that’s wider than just exhibiting them in a gallery or museum. I kept getting that question: 'What is the world in which these objects exist?' and so I wrote the story about that.” – Daniel Arsham

To call Daniel Arsham multi-disciplinary scarcely seems to do his broad oeuvre justice. His work spans art, filmmaking, design, architecture and performance, with powerful themes woven into his narrative by way of an abstract gesture or an evocative prop, and yet there’s no gratuitous creativity to be found in his work. Here, substance wins over style every time.

The newest portion of his creative endeavour, an extensive nine-part film series entitled Future Relic, is perhaps the most groundbreaking project he has created to date. Each of the films, whose cast includes the likes of James Franco and Juliette Lewis, presents a kind of excavation of modern society, something like the archaeologists he describes on Easter Island. “Much of my work is about taking something normal and everyday, and making slight adjustments to it,” he explains.

The fourth instalment in the series is set in the cockit of a plane, where the director raises powerful ideas around our changing environment – a subject at the top of the cultural agenda given the discussion surrounding France’s sustainable innovation forum COP21 in Paris this month. The film launched at the Miami Beach Edition during Miami Art Basel as part of The B&O Play Collective, a global arts initiative which serves to celebrate pioneering creatives of all disciplines through a series of immersive live events, in collaboration with Dazed Media, celebrating the heritage of Bang & Olufsen. It's a dynamic fit; Arsham's fascination with the future governed the conception of Future Relic, and B&O Play is similarly forward-thinking and innovative in its approach. "The future is something that contains the everyday – it contains the now," Daniel told Dazed Editor-in-Chief Isabella Burley in conversation after the event. "All the things we see here, in this space, will exist in the future. The film uses references to the idea of the future which existed in the past – the way we imagined it in the 1960s. In some ways, for me, that feels more futuristic than a lot of things that are being made now."