SAFE: A Collection of Works Exploring Safer Futures

In October 2022, SAFE opened at Somerset House, London. The public exhibition featured 10 speculative futures’ projects envisioned, curated, designed and produced by Superflux, commissioned by Lloyd’s Register Foundation.

These 10 projects, created in response to 10 LRF supported research projects, are rooted in real-world test cases and near-future trends. With a particular focus on how we can make the world a safer place, these research projects – and their speculative counterpart – travel across land and sea, addressing topics from food scarcity and water infrastructure, to big data and the future of automation.

Within the format of a public-facing exhibition, Superflux capture, challenge and re-imagine how the future is unfolding in the present, to offer an imaginative and artistic view of what our shared futures could look like.

Constant news of extreme flooding, extreme heat, extreme violence feed a growing sense of a world adrift. But, hidden from the public eye, groups of people are coming together to innovate ways in which we can steer toward a safer world for future generations.

SAFE immerses you in the poetics of 10 multidisciplinary research projects exploring safer futures. From the synergetic harvesting of rainwater in Mexico City; abundant seaweed farms thriving beneath the water surface; choreographed explosions and cryogenic testing of sea-based architectures in South Korea; and shadow dances between physical worlds and their digital twins. Elementary materials together with ingenious technologies and regenerative practice can salve present-day anxieties.

Traversing the real and imagined, these 10 works foreground the positive tangible opportunities granted by such research initiatives, and simultaneously extend the reach of their potential. Can technologies and infrastructures, systems and temperaments shape a world absent of needless grief and suffering? This is the social, technological and ecological commitment that safer futures must enfold and uphold.

  • Scene from Attunement. Produced in conversation with Assuring Autonomy International Programme (AAIP), University of York.
  • Overview of The Seas Are No Longer Dying
  • Scene from Attunement