We’re continuing our series introducing the team. This time: Mariam, who’s joining us as an intern working on event coordination and impact research support, and will be closely involved in the upcoming Café Futuresque pilot.
Mariam is studying international business and management at Esdes, recently spent a semester in South Korea, and has a background in foreign policy. As she puts it: understanding how different politics and cultures work around the world helps address, more precisely, the diverse concerns people have about the future. What caught her attention about CTL is that it creates spaces where those differences can be shared, felt, and imagined together.
Of the three registers we work across (art, research, public engagement), research is her familiar ground, art is a curiosity, and public engagement is the one that makes her slightly uncomfortable. You can’t control it. You can’t perfect it in advance. She wants to learn how to design for people, not just think about them.
She put it well when describing what she hopes to find out about herself here: “Can I listen to a work of art the way I know how to listen to an academic paper? Can I help create an experience, not just interpret it afterwards?”
Café Futuresque is a good place to start. Her instinct about why food and the future belong together: three meals a day, the time you take for each, the habits that surround them. All deeply structured, all slowly shifting. The future of food could go toward something more thoughtful and nourishing, or toward whatever’s cheapest and fastest. Because food is so universal and so daily, it might be the most concrete way to ask: which future are we actually heading toward?
When we asked what question she keeps coming back to, she said: “How do I stay lucid about crises without losing my capacity to act joyfully?” For someone who’s 20, that’s a question worth carrying.
What she hopes to take away from the internship: a stronger sense of translation (between registers of experience, not languages). How do you turn a researcher’s intuition into an artistic gesture? And that gesture into a public conversation that actually lands? She says she’s good at analysis. She wants to get better at building bridges people want to cross, without oversimplifying what’s on the other side.
Bienvenue, Mariam!
