Monstrous Futurities: Practices in (Un)learning, (Un)making, and (Un)worlding is the new two-year Temporary Program starting in September 2025 at Sandberg Instituut. It seeks to engage with monstrous imaginaries, their subversive potentialities and material and social affects in the world through expanded practices—from everyday rituals to speculative interventions—rooted in and moving towards transformative justice.

In the midst of multiple social, economic, and environmental crises and the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism and late-capitalism—we approach (un)worlding and speculation as a way to retain both hope and hope-making. Together, we will attend to interconnected struggles through minor gestures—re/imagining bodies, worlds, and futurities through curious, critical, and creative transdisciplinary practices—dismantling normativities that keep the monstrous at bay. Working from intersectional perspectives, in dialogue with more-than-human, queer, glitch, transfeminist, crip, cyborg discourse and practice, we attune to the im/possibilities of (un)worlding.

Monstrous Futurities asks: What monstrous im/possibilities may emerge through practices of (un)learning dominant ideologies? How might these practices support justice-centered trans/formations in times of crisis, where the monstrous becomes a way of imagining and doing otherwise? What monsters and whose futurities? How might artistic strategies and expanded practices engage in acts of (un)learning, (un)making, and (re)worlding? How can we collectively create radical, loving, and vulnerable responses against oppressive struggles and structures? How can we transition, transmute, and transform ourselves? What can we achieve together that we cannot alone?

It is our hope that, as a Temporary Program, Monstrous Futurities emerges with radical tenderness, like wildflowers that appear within the cracks—resilient, vulnerable, unstoppable, and deviant—cultivating spaces for (un)learning towards the (un)making of monstrous more-than-human worlds.