The French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), the cultural service of the French Embassy for South Africa, Lesotho, and Malawi, has launched Futures_Past: Amplifying Memory with Immersive Technologies in partnership with Electric South, the Cape Town–based organization implementing the project and overseeing artist support, production, and exhibitions.
The two-year program connects artists with archives in South Africa, Lesotho, and Malawi to reinterpret cultural heritage using digital media. It combines grants, mentorship, and exhibition support for six immersive storytelling projects that will use 360° video, virtual or augmented reality, sensor-based or interactive installations, and immersive sound design — all grouped under extended reality (XR) — to make archival material accessible to the public.
Set to run from July 2025 through March 2027, the program is now in its public launch phase and has three main components: a mapping study of the immersive-arts landscape in Southern Africa, a mobility exchange that will send selected practitioners from the three countries to France to engage with institutions and festivals that specialize in immersive media, and full production support for six new works developed with partner archives. Each selected team will receive between 500,000 and 1.2 million South African rand (about USD 28,000 TO 65,000), covering production costs, artist and technologist fees, and necessary technology and overheads.
In July 2025, the French Institute opened the first phase of the program with a call for archival and cultural institutions in the region, and six were selected: the Royal Archives, Museum and Information Centre (Matsieng, Lesotho); Music Crossroads Malawi (Lilongwe, Malawi); GALA Queer Archive (Johannesburg, South Africa); Iziko Museums of South Africa (Cape Town); !Khwa ttu San Culture & Education Center (Yzerfontein, South Africa); and the National Film, Video and Sound Archives (Pretoria, South Africa). Those institutions will now collaborate with the creative teams to be chosen in the current artist call.
The next phase, the open call, requires teams to include a director or creative lead from the country where the partner archive is based, a technologist or technical lead, a producer, and a trainee assistant producer under the age of 30. Projects must be based in one of the three participating countries and show both artistic vision and technical capacity. In addition to the grant funds, selected teams receive structured mentorship, facilitated access to archival collections, and support for public exhibition of the completed work in 2026.
Contracts will be bespoke, negotiated between each archive and artist team, safeguarding creative ownership while ensuring respectful interpretation of archival and community material.
The deadline for artist applications is November 9, 2025, at 23:59 South Africa Standard Time (SAST). Production will begin in early 2026 and conclude by August 2026, with exhibitions scheduled to run for at least three months between September and December 2026, with additional support for installation and touring. One team member and one archivist from each project will also travel to France for professional exchange and exhibition planning.
Electric South has supported immersive artists on the continent for nearly a decade with residencies and collaborations with companies like Meta and Unity. The French Institute’s involvement introduces diplomatic and institutional infrastructure tied to France’s cultural-cooperation work, anchoring the initiative within established heritage and public-engagement nodes.
What drew my attention to Futures_Past is that it sits in a part of the African screen landscape that’s not often discussed as one that’s viable — immersive and interactive storytelling — even when contextualized within digital-media economies built around YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. The initiative is also approaching the space, still rather underexplored globally, within a research-driven structure rather than a conventional grant call; less as a funding round than as a study of what’s possible. Part of the project’s purpose is to gather data: to map who is working in immersive media, what resources exist, and how archival material might function within that space.
Immersive storytelling tends to sit on the periphery of the screen ecosystem, even though there’s clear activity happening. Here, though, the combination of a tangible funding commitment and an explicitly exploratory framing makes this seem different.
XR formats also seem like genuinely engaging ways to work with archives, none of which I have experienced firsthand, which makes me most curious.
The budgets are small by feature film standards but adequate for experimental work of this kind, ultimately meant to find out what immersive practice in Southern Africa can look like when given major institutional backing.
Futures_Past also fits within a wider international push to link cultural heritage and technology. UNESCO’s 2025 workshop on Digital Technologies to Empower World Heritage in Africa, its Dive into Heritage virtual-reality exhibition, and the new Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Property launched in September 2025 all suggest a policy turn toward digital preservation and immersive access.
Regionally, programs such as Electric South’s New Dimensions Lab, the Goethe-Institut’s Immersive Futures initiative, and EU-funded heritage partnerships are building technical capacity and exhibition routes for African creators working in XR.
The Futures_Past launch also arrives as multiple African institutions rebuild their own cinematic heritage infrastructure. Earlier this month, Namibia’s Film Preservation Project, led by the Museums Association of Namibia with the National Archives and the Namibia Film Commission — funded by the Carl Schlettwein Stiftung in Basel — became the country’s first coordinated national effort to catalog, preserve, and digitize moving-image heritage.
Together with initiatives in Nigeria, Egypt, Algeria, and Burkina Faso that Akoroko has tracked over the past year, one can only hope that a continent-wide effort to formalize archival infrastructure is afoot, after decades without coordinated national methods for film and audiovisual preservation.
In that larger context, Futures_Past represents the experimental, technology-forward counterpart to this archival wave, particularly as artificial intelligence (AI) disruption looms. Where Namibia’s new project secures what already exists, Futures_Past tests how the archive itself can become creative material.
After production, each immersive work will enter a structured exhibition phase in 2026 across Southern African countries and potentially in France via the program’s mobility component. The partner archives retain custodial access to the completed works, while the artist teams keep creative ownership, allowing for future circulation, teaching use, and festival presentation.
It’s a noteworthy combination of research, funding, and artistic risk-taking in a space that still sits peripheral to institutional, market, and policy conversations shaping the future of Africa’s screen economies.
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