The Future Has Already Arrived — We Just Keep Calling It Tomorrow

There is a moment inside the new exhibition at Musée d’ethnographie de Genève (MEG) when a visitor stops thinking about the future as a destination and begins to suspect it may have been a story all along.

For a young curious traveller from Kuantan, Malaysia, who grew up rummaging through his late great-grandfather’s yellowing science-fiction paperbacks and pre-war magazines, that realisation lands with unusual force.

As a child, he spent countless afternoons staring at illustrations of gleaming lunar colonies, interplanetary cities suspended above alien deserts and silver flying saucers carrying mysterious visitors from worlds beyond human comprehension.

To his great-grandfather’s generation, the future was not merely tomorrow. It was mythology. A promised land. A technological Eden waiting somewhere beyond the horizon.

Geneva’s Future, What’s That? Arrives like a conversation between those forgotten dreams and our uneasy present.

Running until January 2027, the exhibition refuses to offer easy answers. Instead, it poses a deceptively simple question: What exactly is the future?

The journey begins inside a cabinet of curiosities where futuristic toys, robots, tarot cards, Buddhist statuettes, games and prophetic objects from across cultures sit side by side. It feels less like entering a museum than stepping inside the attic of civilisation itself — a place where centuries of hopes, fears and predictions have been carefully preserved.

From there, the exhibition unfolds through four remarkable zones, each organised around a different understanding of time.

One imagines time as a straight line racing toward progress. Another sees it as a cycle of perpetual renewal. A third proposes the startling notion that the future lies behind us while the past stands visible before our eyes.

The final section explores the future as something constructed in the present, here and now.

Along the way, visitors encounter nearly 200 objects and installations, ranging from nineteenth-century divination tools and Japanese clocks to robotic Daruma dolls, speculative maps of Geneva in 2050, weather instruments, fortune-telling artefacts and imaginative creations co-designed by Swiss schoolchildren and contemporary artists.

Some objects are amusing. Others are quietly unsettling.

A robot once marketed as the domestic servant of tomorrow became a commercial failure. A futuristic map imagines autonomous transport networks and entirely new professions.

A speculative “consent helmet” asks whether future technology might allow animals to approve being eaten. Suddenly, futurism becomes less about gadgets and more about ethics.

Perhaps the exhibition’s greatest achievement lies in its scenography.

Created under the artistic direction of Cabanon Vertical, the exhibition transforms museum-going into an exploratory urban walk. Visitors are encouraged to inhabit spaces rather than simply observe them. Bodies and senses become active participants in the experience.

Even more impressively, much of the scenography incorporates recycled materials from previous exhibitions, creating an environment that physically embodies the idea of responsible futures.

As Cabanon Vertical explains, the aim was to imagine “an optimistic and shareable future” while placing visitors themselves at the centre of its construction.

The result is playful, immersive and unexpectedly emotional.

Equally significant is the exhibition’s radical methodology. Developed over two years with Genevan adolescents, Future, What’s That? Is an exhibition about children and adults created by children and adults. Young participants helped shape the title, themes, installations and visitor experience itself.

Their influence is visible everywhere, particularly in discussions around food, shelter, sleep and play — concerns far more universal than the technological fantasies adults often mistake for futurism.

This raises larger questions.

Why have humans always been fascinated by the future?

Ancient civilisations consulted oracles, interpreted celestial movements and sought messages from spirits. Twentieth-century

Futurists worshipped speed, machinery and acceleration. Today’s Silicon Valley evangelists promise salvation through artificial intelligence, algorithms and planetary-scale computation.

Different centuries. Different languages. The same yearning.

Perhaps the future exists nowhere except within the architecture of the human imagination.

Perhaps every flying saucer, every lunar city and every technological prophecy is less a prediction than a mirror reflecting what each era desires most — or fears most intensely.

Seen this way, the exhibition becomes a powerful critique of modern chronopolitics. Are we inventing tomorrow, or merely obeying stories inherited from yesterday? Are today’s technologies genuine breakthroughs or self-fulfilling prophecies first drafted by science-fiction writers decades ago?

And if autonomous systems increasingly shape civilisation, can humanity still claim authorship of the future at all?

These questions feel especially urgent in an age obsessed with quarterly results, viral trends and endless scrolling.

The exhibition proposes a quieter possibility.

What if futurism is not about predicting tomorrow but becoming better ancestors?

That idea resonates deeply with MEG itself. Founded in 1901, the museum safeguards more than 75,000 objects and over 70,000 documents chronicling humanity’s extraordinary diversity.

Its mission extends beyond preservation; it is an institution devoted to understanding how people across cultures have made meaning of the world and their place within it.

For travellers who know MEG merely as one of Geneva’s cultural attractions, Future, What’s That? Offers a compelling reminder that museums are not repositories of dead history. They are laboratories for imagining what comes next.

And standing among robots, oracles, dreams, prophecies and impossible futures, one thought lingers long after leaving the gallery:

The future may never have been about reaching another planet.

It may always have been about learning how to live better on this one.

For tickets and more details on the exhibition, visit https://www.meg.ch/fr today.

*Photos by Demian Tschumi, courtesy of © MEG,