Many people experience institutions as distant, slow or difficult to influence. When decision-making feels out of reach, trust weakens and participation fades. If democracy is to stay meaningful, the ways we organise power and collective life need to evolve.
On 21 March 2026, IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture in Utrecht hosts Parliament of Parallel Futures, a full-day event exploring how institutions can be rethought, redesigned and tested for the realities people live today.
Artists, architects, designers, and researchers will approach institutions as materials to be shaped rather than as structures that cannot change. Through imagined museums, experimental assemblies and spatial models for collective decision-making, the programme asks what becomes possible when we redesign how authority, representation and public life work.
Each contribution creates a temporary “parliament” inside the space. These working environments invite participants to explore, in practice, how decisions could be organised differently. In the afternoon, a participatory lab further opens the process, allowing participants to sketch and test their own “unreal institutions” and turn ideas into concrete proposals.
Contributors include Thomas Bellinck, Markus Miessen, David Mulder van der Vegt, Pete Fung and Lore Gablier, Programme Manager at the European Cultural Foundation. Taking up the question of how Europe might be reshaped by redesigning its institutional architectures, she presents The European Pavilion as a space of imagination for new narratives, encounters and possible futures. The event is organised in collaboration with ACES: The Future of European Democracy at the University of Amsterdam.
By creating space to question how we gather, decide and act together, Parliament of Parallel Futures focuses on what democratic renewal requires: imagination, experimentation and the confidence that institutions can change.
