The Weird Futures series showcases examples of fiction, video essays, documentary films, and nonfiction that explore problematic depictions of the present and the future, encompassing narratives of prediction and control, as well as uncanny scenarios that may sound vaguely familiar yet subtly disturbing. At a time when narratives of stability, security, and progress are fading due to growing uncertainty and the deliberate exploitation of volatility, this series of films and videos employs a combination of speculation, irony, and sheer absurdity to amplify the strangeness of the dominant technological imaginaries, while emphasizing the inherent violence and urge for control that defines them. This activity, curated by Bani Brusadin in collaboration with artist and researcher Solveig Qu Suess, is part of Medialab Matadero's LAB 4 Weird Futures program (September–December 2025). 01/11/2025 Rola Rolls (업체 eobchae, Korea, 2024, 10’) The artist collective 업체 eobchae imagines post-petroleum future in which an ecologist guerrilla develops...

Collapse of the Weave Function fits within one of the core themes of LAB 4 —“soft” science fiction— understood as poetic interventions in the technological fault lines of the present. The project will take shape through four works: the audiovisual installation Hometown and the textile pieces Collapse of the Weave Function, Vortices, and Centerless, all commissioned by Medialab Matadero specifically for this occasion. Filmed in Kyiv and Beirut in 2017, Hometown (2018) constructs an imaginary city through two places that never meet, yet become a unified landscape across the film’s two screens. Ghina and Lera, the protagonists, are doubles of the same character. While they remain apart, speaking in turns, the film opens up a visual and linguistic space that is more poetic than narrative. The images act as resonances—indirect, suggestive, and polysemic. What should feel ordinary becomes unsettling. Meanwhile, the web and digital layers of reality—abstract and intangible—are rendered...