The Future is Now is a film-exhibition conceived for the Portugal Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, curated and directed by Andreia Garcia and directed for film by Bauti Godoy / Canal180.
Departing from the idea that the future is no longer a distant expectation but a condition being constructed in the present, the project brings together 23 architectural practices connected to different geographies across Portugal. Diverse in their trajectories, scales and languages, these practices share a critical engagement with contemporary ecological, social, economic and territorial challenges.
Through first-person testimonies and images of built works, projects, processes and contexts, the film constructs a plural portrait of contemporary Portuguese architecture. Rather than focusing solely on finished objects, it seeks to make visible the modes of thinking and making from which they emerge: ways of working with scarcity and existing resources, reconsidering how we inhabit and build, activating overlooked territories, and connecting architecture with other fields of knowledge.
Ecological, social and economic sustainability runs through the curatorial approach as an interdependent condition. Moving between rehabilitation, material research, participatory processes, constructional experimentation and territorial speculation, The Future is Now reveals an architecture that is both situated and open to the world, operating across the political, environmental, social and poetic.
The film does not seek to establish a single identity for Portuguese architecture, but rather to give visibility to the diversity of positions and modes of practice that are transforming it today. Here, the future is not a promise: it is already present in the choices, ideas and practices through which other possibilities are being built.