Heritage Reborn in the Digital

FUTURE MAASTRICHT at ART DUBAI 2025

Within the Digital section of Art Dubai 2025, Future Maastricht marks a bold and visionary presence, echoed in the official guide published by Sandy Times. For its first participation in the fair, Future doesn’t merely present works—it sets in motion a curatorial rethinking of the very concept of heritage, revealing how artistic legacy can be not only preserved, but regenerated through digital technologies.

The exhibition revolves around the digitisation of historical works—from stained glass and medieval manuscripts to early 20th-century paintings, such as those by André Derain—crafting a layered narrative that bridges epochs and languages. These artefacts, once destined for the silence of archives or museum vitrines, are transformed into living, accessible, and reconfigurable entities. In this process, memory is no longer static—it becomes fluid, participatory, and interactive.

In an exhibition landscape dominated by immersive installations, augmented reality, and post-digital languages, Future Maastricht stands out for its ability to reactivate the ancient in the present, questioning how cultural value can be transmitted through new modes of encoding and representation. Its installation—praised in the official fair guide—emerges as a crossroad between conservation and avant-garde: a place where the past is never faithfully reproduced, but reimagined as creative stimulus, as living matter to be interrogated.

With this proposal, Future not only fits seamlessly into the curatorial vision of Art Dubai Digital—it expands it, offering a poetic and critical alternative to mainstream narratives on the relationship between art and technology. It is an invitation to view heritage not as something to be jealously preserved, but as an active source of imagination and future.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved