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It Happened Tomorrow: Drawing Climate Fiction with Cultural Collections [WORKSHOP]
Carlo De Gaetano, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
Rasa Bočytė, Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision
In the face of a warming planet and shifting environmental narratives, the climate crisis is not only ecological but profoundly connected to our capacity to imagine it. Echoing Amitav Ghosh’s call to address this “crisis of imagination,” this workshop proposes to expand climate imaginaries through the lens of transdisciplinary drawing practices. Situated within discourses on participatory artistic research and creative reuse of cultural collections, "It Happened Tomorrow" offers a platform for envisioning desirable futures where human and more-than-human communities adapt their ways of living with rising sea levels.
This ongoing series of workshops started in 2023 in the context of Climate Imaginaries at Sea, a program hosted by the Visual Methodologies Collective at HvA in collaboration with researchers from Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Amsterdam University of Arts, aiming to speculate possible futures in and around water. Iterations of this workshop have been hosted at the Society 5.0 festival in Amsterdam, the International Visual Methods Conference in Rome, the REMIX Fest, and the first Dutch New European Bauhaus network gathering (both in Hilversum). Participants included art students, archive curators, climatologists, local policymakers, architects, poets, and designers.
The workshop is designed to foster a dialogic space where drawing is employed as a critical tool for a transdisciplinary inquiry on climate imaginaries. By integrating visual methodologies with participatory practices, it aims to hold a space not only for envisioning adaptation scenarios but also for cultivating a practice of shared critical reflection and dialogue. This approach highlights the potential of drawing and fiction to blur the boundaries between disciplines and respond to the crisis of imagination.
The workshop starting point is a curated special collection of still images from short films, documentaries, and news reports from the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision archives and the Europeana open and reusable digital cultural heritage, documenting different forms of (other than) human relationships with water. Participants are invited to select images from the collection that resonate personally and transform these into speculative landscapes of tomorrow by drawing together. This process facilitates collective future narratives while offering a moment to reconsider, alter, and repair past imaginaries in which water is preponderantly framed as a site of extraction or as a separate entity to be feared and managed. The drawings are then used to inspire a collective climate fiction exercise, where participants write together short stories, diary entries, and scenes describing how living in such landscapes might feel.
During the conference, we will invite participants to take part in this collective fiction making exercise. Our goal is to facilitate a transformative experience where imagining and drawing the future becomes a means to understand our present, critique our past, and generate impactful, community-oriented responses to the ecological crises of our time. Through this workshop, we aim to inspire educators, researchers, and students to embrace collective drawing and climate fiction as vital components of climate discourse and to recognize the role of creative practices in forging resilient futures.
Keywords: climate imaginaries, cultural collections, climate fiction, participatory drawing, sea level rise
