Madeleine
Schwinge

Madeleine Schwinge is an art researcher at the interfaces of art, design, systems thinking and futures studies, with a focus on planetary thinking, collective agency and socio-cultural shifts.

As a curator, educator and advisor for art and future design, and with a background in visual arts, systemic coaching and serial entrepreneurship, she heads the re:future lab, that she founded in 2020.

Her ‘HOLITOPIA Manifesto’ (2022) is a call to co-create a holistic and pragmatic utopia – here and now. It urges a paradigm shift through creative intelligence and provides a methodological and practical framework for it, which acts as the basis for her curatorial, educational and project-advisory work. In 2024, she initiated and directed the HOLITOPIA Festival for Arts and Futures, which was awarded by Projekt Zukunft, a program of the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises, in the highest category for innovation and international attention.

In her artistic work, she uses multimedia and performance to explore the upheavals of our time and their effects on our psyche and behaviour. Her ongoing series ‚The Psychedelic Chicks‘ has been featured in scholarly publications on post-studio art and was nominated for the 2019 Social Art Award.

She lectures at the HTW University of Applied Sciences in Berlin in the master's program in System Design.

She is engaged with the WFSF World Future Studies Federation (a UNESCO Partner) and the Gesellschaft für künstlerische Forschung Deutschland. She served the Ogilvy Futuring Science and Ethics Advisory Board in 2022-2023, and was appointed a founding member of Berlin Design e.V. in 2023.

She holds a diploma in economics (DHBW Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Stuttgart) and is a certified systemic coach and teaching coach (Dr. Bock Coaching Akademie). She pursued further studies in art history (Free University Berlin) and obtained certificates in curation and fine arts (Berlin University of the Arts).