On a cold day in February, I met with two librarians at the Reykjavík Library (borgarbókasafn) to discuss a Future Festival. While my entire life consuming culture had prepared me for a Blade Runner or Minority Report style dystopian discussion, instead we discussed optimism. The Future Festival runs from March 1 to March 14, 2026.
“The most important thing about this future festival is that it is set in the present, and we are practising skills and practising how we share those skills with one another, basically practising to live in the futures we want to live in. So it’s a festival that is set in the present to practice for the future we want to live in,” Project Manager Martyna Karolina Daniel tells me.
With this we launch into a discussion of the famous repair café, an event the library hosts focusing on electronics repairs. They don’t just provide books—volunteers literally help you fix your electronics.
Fanny Sanne Sissoko, the other Project Manager for this festival, jumps in: “We wanted this festival to be really hands on, because libraries are places of imagination, but there are different types of imagination. There is imagination that go into someone’s dream world, but there is also imagination that’s really tangible, which is making. And so all our programme is not talking [but] making.” She gives the example of their repair cafe. “There is a whole programme around planting, because we have a seed library. We’re going to invite people to come and make plant pots out of old books, recycling old books into plant pots.”
“We also designed a planting calendar that’s designed for the Icelandic climate,” Fanny continues. “Because often when you want to grow your own food in Iceland, it’s hard to know where to start you think you need a greenhouse, or the directions you find online are for America or England or a foreign climate. So we worked with designers to create this really beautiful calendar for when do you plant your radishes? When do you plant you and how is it gonna work in Iceland? And so that’s really practical.”
And with that, our discussion veers wholly into gardening.
“We will have all those seeds, because we selected those 15 plus crops with a professional gardener working for the city. So this planting calendar features a selection of crops that can be grown in Iceland without the use of a greenhouse. They can grow outside. You need to start them in your window, but that will also be very clear in the planting calendar. Eventually you move them outside to a balcony, to a garden,” Martyna explains.
Beyond a deeply tactile, deeply practical experience, there will be a good amount of focus on other aspects of the present that affect our future. In our discussion, we come back relatively frequently, as all contemporary conversations seem to do, to cell phones.
“One of our installations is a Faraday box that you can step into and you lose all phone signal,” Martyna states. “And this is tied to workshops that we will be hosting during the festival. We are hosting phone sleeping bag workshops, and we’ve been very excited about those as well. A phone sleeping bag is you need to bring a piece of fabric that is very dear to you, something that holds memories and that you don’t want to part with but can’t use anymore. Yeah. So you bring that we have the dimensions on the website, and we bring the Faraday fabric and the sewing machines and pencil fabric.”
The result of this time away from phones, we all hope, will bring some of our present back, and save some of our future.
There is a full list of activities at the Reykjavik City Library website. The perspective is enthusiastic and positive. It is while I’m looking over the list of seeds available that I blurt out the obvious realization: There’s nobody more future-looking and optimistic than a farmer, who plants in spring in the hope of what will come in the fall. For a country with a long and brutal agricultural history, the Future Festival feels like a return to old norms. The organizers even mention the festival was planned specifically to coincide with planting schedules.
Meet up. Repair your electronics. Get your seeds. Get away from your phone. Seems like a plan.
The primary exhibits for the Future Festival are at Borgarbókasafnið Grófinni, Tryggvagata 15, March 1 through March 14.
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