Reimagining Anthropocene Futures Making Session II: Off-Earth Futures

About the event:
Speculative Worlds Research Collective and UCL Anthropocene presents Reimagining Anthropocene Futures Through Speculative Making and Thinking.

Reimagining Anthropocene Futures aims to explore the existential questions of what it means to be human. In a series of afternoon making sessions, we take a hands-on approach to thinking about the Anthropocene through drawing and collage.

In the second of two sessions, Off-Earth Futures, we invite participants to make material speculative visions of resistance and hope in the wake of the Anthropocene. We invite researchers from across disciplines to participate in intimate making sessions each of which begins with a brief 10-minute prompt for conversation followed by two hours of creating. The ethos of the sessions is based on using what already exists to re-form existing materials, technologies, and knowledge systems.

In this session, we explore outer space and how post-Earth futures become enmeshed in a discourse of off-Earth colonialism as a response to environmental collapse. We start this session with a 10 minute provocation led by William Stewart about his research about the cosmic imaginary and the geopolitics of outer space as well as his collaboration with artist Mary Yacoob. It is followed by a 90-minute making session, discussion, and documentation for presentation.