Futureproof

Futureproof, directed by John Hulsey, is a documentary essay-film that explores the development of risk-management industries in the United States and the effects that these industries have on peoples’ lives. Moving between the archive and contemporary case studies, the film tracks the development of the insurance industry, which appeared during the nineteenth century to mitigate commercial and industrial risks and grew into one of the largest forces in our economy and our world, effectively structuring not only social property relations but serving to fundamentally reshape major parts of civic public life, such as the nuclear family, prevailing notions of race and gender, and what constitutes “normal” human behavior. Hartford, Connecticut, became the center of the insurance industry as it transformed and expanded over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While they initially formed to address the risks of industrial and urban fires, insurance companies soon developed means to underwrite private corporations, federal projects, industrial and agricultural workers, and even the work of enslaved people in the Upper South. Futureproof  offers an experiential and associative look into the past and present of the risk-management world, including the development of catastrophe-proof agriculture, VR-therapy that recreates traumatic events in clients’ lives, and life-size model homes built to be destroyed during disaster simulations. Complementing the historical frame of the CCP’s activities, the film reimagines the project’s themes as a question of futurity, a vexing issue for humans in our attempts to control the natural and social worlds around us.