2051 (Everything Turned Out Rather Well)
Student Exhibition · Interdisciplinary Design Project
On 27–28 January 2026, 2051 (Everything Turned Out Rather Well) was presented as an exhibition of student works by Berlin International University of Applied Sciences at Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory.
The exhibition invited visitors to imagine the year 2051 as a moment in which everything had turned out rather well. Ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and political polarization, the defining crises of the early 21st century, were framed as distant memories. From this imagined future, the exhibition asked a central question:
How did we get here?
Developed within BI’s Interdisciplinary Design Project, the student works applied the method of backcasting, working backward from a utopian 2051 to identify the actions and decisions in 2026 that could have enabled these futures. The projects departed from five specific sites in Berlin, the Landwehrkanal, the A100 highway, Warschauer Brücke, Westhafen, and the Alte Försterei Stadium, and were rooted in local contexts, real actions, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
At a time when future-thinking is often dominated by catastrophic forecasting, the exhibition reflected on the political and cultural agency of hope, and on dreaming as an act of rebellion.
The opening evening on Tuesday, 27 January featured welcome words by Dunya Bouchi, Prof. Yüksel Pöğün-Zander, PhD, Prof. Lukas Staudinger, Barbora Demovič, Jeannette Riedel, and the students’ curatorial team.
On Wednesday, 28 January, the exhibition was open to the public and accompanied by guided tours and performances. The program concluded with Aedes Lab Talk #44, titled Democratic Education, Space for Cooperation, Collaboration and Compromise.
The project team of 2051 (Everything Turned Out Rather Well) included Aïda Chraibi, Amira Djemli, Andrius Prilepskij, Asya Halise Yilmaz, Chiara Clarissa Bausch, David Moldovan, Dominika Jaszowska, Dominykas Kriauza, Ekaterina Kim, Elena Kilchitskaya, Elizabete Celombitko, Era Merovci, Erika Kitabayashi, Faraz Khalid Syed Mohammed, Ferzan Dokumacı, Gunnhildur Karen Bridde, Hanul Yim, Ieva Sitkauskaite, Jada Cazabon-Dyer, Kalina Todorova, Katherine Feldmann, Klea Celmanaj, Laman Gasimova, Laura Smektalska, Luna Newman, Maya Kappler, Oriana Winiarski, Paula Gispert Pijuan, Rūdolfs Kirhners, Sena Naib Yassin, Sophia Mcnamara, and Sveinn Eyfjörð Svanþórsson.
2051 (Everything Turned Out Rather Well) was a collaboration between Berlin International University of Applied Sciences and Aedes Metropolitan Lab. The interdisciplinary design project was developed by students from the Faculty of Architecture and Design and was conceived and supervised by Prof. Lukas Staudinger (Architecture), Jeannette Riedel (Interior Architecture), and Barbora Demovič (Graphic Design and Visual Communication).
Photo credits: Orhan Kolukisa, Gudrun Palsdottir
