Last week our guest lecturer and MaCT Faculty José Luis de Vicente, invited as part of the Autumn Lecture Series 2017, inspired the audience with its lecture: After the End of the World.

In the coming decades, humankind will face one of the most complex challenges it has had to address in its history. In the second half of the 21st century, we will have to stop emitting CO2 into the atmosphere forever.

After the End of the World is also an exhibition about the Earth of 2017 irreversibly transformed into the Anthropocene planet after two centuries of human impact on natural systems, curated by José Luis and currently on show at the CCCB Barcelona.

During his lecture José Luis discussed about how we will reach the world of the latter half of the 21st century, and about our society’s responsibility to the generations who will be born and grow up in it.

“We know that it is not easy to face tough issues. We know that many people will be uncomfortable. But we think that visitors will come out of the exhibition thinking of their personal responsibilities and their power of being a change agent. Every parent will tell you that they would do anything for their children. That’s why we need to overcome this challenge,” says José Luís de Vicente.

José Luis de Vicente is a curator, writer and researcher specialising in the analysis of the cultural spaces that exist between technology, social innovation, art and design.

He is currently involved in various research and academic programmes, among them the Master in City and Technology at IAAC and Visualizar at Medialab-Prado, Madrid. He is the curator of Sónar+D, the innovation area of the Sónar Festival, and he is a member of the curatorial team of the FutureEverything Festival.