Imperfect Futures is an interdisciplinary collective working across art, design, and architecture. Through speculative research, spatial interventions, and curatorial practice, the collective interrogates power in design, language, and the image-world. Their work traces the interconnections between colonialism, climate, and capital, focusing on land dispossession, leisure infrastructures, and the control of nature.

Engaging with futurity, aspiration, access, borders, and publicness, Imperfect Futures challenges hegemonic forms of knowledge production by generating multi-narrative imaginaries across diverse geographies and disciplines, exploring ideas through drawing, mapping, film, installation, and performance as methods for engaging with relational infrastructures and networked practices.

Central to their work is a critical engagement with the politics of space, and time. Imperfect Futures is an opening to think through alternative timelines and timescapes, and to critically engage with spatial practice as a means to reshape historical narratives and envision alternative futures.

The collective comprises Naadira Patel, Manijeh Verghese, Sarah de Villiers, Madeleine Amsler, Alice Clancy, and Zen Marie, alongside an expanding network of collaborators.

Naadira Patel

Naadira Patel is an artist, designer and educator who works across the fields of art, architecture, design and cultural programming. Her work focuses on the intersection of design, social change, and cultural storytelling, blending critical inquiry with creative practice to address issues of identity, technology and spatial politics. She holds a research Masters in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam, and has lectured at the Wits School of Arts, and at the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) in Johannesburg. She is the director of softwork, a multidisciplinary design and curatorial practice working across art, architecture, and social justice, working collaboratively with artists, architects, feminist and queer organisers and cultural programmers. She has recently worked with the Canadian Centre for Architecture on the publication “Fugitive Archives: A Sourcebook for Centring Africa in Histories of Architecture”, with the African Futures Institute and with the curatorial and graphic design team of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia (2023).

Sarah de Villiers

Sarah de Villiers is an architectural researcher, designer, and educator. She is currently a lecturer in architectural design at Norwich University of the Arts and the founder of spaceKIOSK, a spatial research practice operating at the intersection of design, technology, and trade. Sarah was an assistant curator in the Laboratory of the Future (18th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia 2023) and a tutor at the Biennale College Architettura 2023. Her work investigates the entanglements between spatial forms of access, of knowledge, power, and economy, often through speculative cartography, illustration, and multi-scalar spatial interventions. Sarah’s collaborative practice spans institutions and disciplines, including engagements with the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town, the African Futures Institute in Accra, and the Archive of Forgetfulness. She was formerly a Masters Unit Leader in Unit 18 at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg and was a co-founding director of Counterspace.

Zen Marie

Zen Marie is an artist and educator based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
His practice and research spans film, photography, performance, drawing and writing, with a focus on site specific creative practices and creative knowledge economies. Zen holds a practice based Phd in Fine Art from WITS University, an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and is a graduate of the two-year residency program at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. His creative practice is complemented by his position as a lecturer in Fine Art at the Wits School of Arts. He is also Senior editor of the Journal for creative practice ellipses [...]

Manijeh Verghese

Manijeh Verghese (she/ her) is the CEO of Open City. Across her career to date, Manijeh has focussed on creating opportunities to widen participation in the making of our built environment. She was co-curator of The Garden of Privatised Delights – the 2021 British Pavilion at the 17th International Venice Architecture Biennale and was the interpretation specialist for the South Asia Gallery at the Manchester Museum in partnership with the British Museum that was co-curated by a collective of over 30 local experts. She was also a tutor at the inaugural Biennale College Architettura as part of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023.  She was previously the Head of Public Engagement at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture, where she also taught the M.Arch design studio Diploma Unit 12. She is currently one of the Mayor of London’s Design Advocates and an External Examiner for the M.Arch programme at The Bartlett, UCL. She is on the Board of Trustees for the Architecture Foundation and a member of the advisory board for The DisOrdinary Architecture Project.

Madeleine Amsler

After studying art history, German and French literature in Zurich and Geneva, Madeleine Amsler (1975) worked in the institutional art world (e.g. Mamco, Geneva, print room of the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne) as well as in the independent art scene (Forde and Ex-Machina in Geneva). Since 2011, she has been co-directing .perf, a nomadic performance festival in Geneva. In 2012 she founded the artist residency Embassy of Foreign Artists and co-directed it for 5 years. Furthermore, she worked as visual arts specialist for the Swiss arts council Pro Helvetia and as cultural counsellor (visual arts, video and film) for Canton Basel-City. From 2018-2021, she was the coordinator of the Swiss Performance Art Award. Since two years, Madeleine Amsler is the co-head of the visual arts department at HKB, school of Arts, in Bern.

Alice Clancy

Alice Clancy is an architectural practitioner whose practice involves education, curation and photography. Collaboration is at the heart of all aspects of her practice. Alice works as an Assistant Professor and Director of Teaching and Learning at the School of Architecture, Planning & Environmental Policy at UCD. She is a key member of the UCD Building Change Team, a HEA/HCI initiative involving all six Irish schools of Architecture. In 2023 she was a key consultant and contributor to the first ever Biennale College Architettura in Venice. Her curatorial practice includes an unprecedented two appointments to the Curatorial Team for La Biennale Architettura: In 2018 as Assistant to Curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara for FREESPACE, and in 2023 as Assistant to Curator Lesley Lokko for The Laboratory of the Future, the 16th and 18th International Architecture Exhibitions of La Biennale di Venezia respectively. In her photographic practice, she focuses on the careful and considered visual communication of built space, working with designers and building inhabitants to explore how light and the inhabitation of the project animate and ultimately transform each project.