Futuretelling: Dispatches from the DMV

The Futuretelling Workshop is a meditative session best suited for 15-30 people, with the goal of envisioning solarpunk DMV futures.

With Xena Ni and Futuretelling cards as guides, participants will imagine what their communities might feel like, look like, smell like, and work like, 100 years from now. The session will culminate with a short zine-making exercise to document participants' visions.

During a time when thinking about the future inspires more fear than hope, Futuretelling reminds us that many futures may flourish because of us, and that we may flourish in many futures.

Donation RSVP's are welcome to support the event, but are not required.

About the Artist:

Xena Ni is a socially engaged artist who leverages time travel, public archives, and immersive, interactive experiences to bring forward narratives often obscured by history, policy, and societal neglect. Her participatory installations explore how luck, labor, and love shape American lives.

Her experiences as a first-generation immigrant gave her an early awareness of the power of government and community organizing. The goal of her art practice is helping ordinary people understand their power to imagine and shape futures in which we all flourish.

In 2024 she created “Good Fortunes”, a Smithsonian-supported interactive installation that invites viewers to reflect on visions of America' s future from AAPI women leaders and add their own visions. Her piece is the first ever compilation of AAPI women’s future visions for America. In its debut month at Heurich House Museum, 1,000 visitors added 400 future visions.

Ni’s work has garnered attention in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, and Bloomberg. Her installations have been exhibited at the Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts, Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, Kunstraum in Brooklyn, and the Data Through Design exhibition in New York City. She earned her BS in Product Design from Stanford University and her MFA in Interaction Design from the School of Visual Arts.

Her current projects include: the DC Museum of Sidewalk Stuff (an archive cataloging DC’s mutual aid history) and We Should Talk (a series exploring the complexity of AAPI identities, which received Federal support from the Asian Pacific American Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center).

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