Lien Derijst, Utopian Kuurne

For Kuurne’s 900th anniversary, we wanted to put the municipality and the residents of Kuurne in the spotlight. This is how the Utopian Kuurne project came about. We chose a room in the Rectory House and filled it in as a time machine, where the visitor travels from the present to 900 years in the future of Kuurne. To introduce the present, we made a graphic novel starring the well-known former inhabitant of Kuurne, Ever Meulen, as the main character. In this story, we recount the strange occurrences in the rectory house, one of which reads that all people ever to enter the house have gone missing. This story ends with a cliffhanger that leads the visitor to the second part of the room, which depicts the future. Here we display the end result obtained by the co-creation, where we illustrated Kuurne within 900 years through the eyes of the inhabitants of Kuurne themselves. As an extra game to make the whole ordeal more interactive, there is a missing persons folder in which all the well-known Kuurnenaars who have gotten lost in the future are depicted. It is the task of the visitor to look for these people and check the box next to their names once found. Lastly, postcards can also be found in the second room, which has a futuristic depiction on the front and an explanation of how that specific aspect came to be on the back.