Imagining Alternative Futures: a local-global remix

Drop in to the Drama Studio in the basement of the Faculty of English where the creators of a six-year project of imagining otherwise will be launching the online version of their visions for globally just, multiply-dimensioned, climate-conscious alternative futures. Originally developed in a performance installation at the Barbican in 2018, we will be sharing our creative strategies for hope against the odds.

This six-panel video installation tells stories of many diverse lives as they navigate accelerating climate change – but in a context of everyone working towards just relations between place, peoples across the globe, and the living world around us. Originally developed in artistic residency at the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, David Attenborough Building, director-researcher Zoë Svendsen (Faculty of English) leads a team of artistic collaborators reflecting on how to develop the muscles of the imagination in response to the challenge laid down by novelist Amitav Ghosh: “The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination. [...] What we need is to find a way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped.” – Amitav Ghosh, ‘The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable’ (2017).