Medialab-Matadero Madrid
Joel Blanco, LAB 4 Weird Futures faculty
Joel Blanco is an artist, designer, researcher and consultant specialising in future scenarios, speculative design and design fiction. Joel is joining Medialab as faculty of the 4th LAB program, titled Weird Futures (read the White Paper to find out more). We asked Joel to respond to the topics we would like to touch upon in the LAB 4 as a starting point for the creative and critical research that we would like to carry out this year, particularly during the Collaborative Prototyping Lab, which is to be held in November 2025 at Medialab Matadero. The result is a twofold contribution: the first one is a short webinar, realized in conversation with Medialab's curator Bani Brusadin, where Joel discusses some seminal ideas about unexpected alignments between bodies, images and infrastructures in contemporary male online subcultures connected to the resurgence of long-gone political fantasies. A short and visionary text entitled MANDIBULA, follows, which can be read as some semi-fictional, portable manifesto to guide Joel's research and contribution to LAB 4 Weird Futures.
The webinar and the text have been commissioned by Medialab in May 2025.
Joel Blanco was included in the Forbes list of the best Spanish futurists of 2022, he is currently member of the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome and curatorial director of the Mayrit Biennial.