An Invitation
to Imagine the Future
Artworks may or may not change the world, but their processes are life crafts –
tools for the future which restore our relation to things and to one another,
and our sense of responsibility and belonging.
Ruth Little, quoted in Lucy Neal, Playing for Time: Making Art as if the World Mattered
(London: Oberon Books, 2015), 264.
Tools for the Future
Throughout "Performing Climate Justice," we have asked: What “tools for the future” might we design? How might using these “tools for the future” “restore our relation to things and to one another, and our sense of responsibility and belonging”?
The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating.
The paths are not to be found, but made,
and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.
John Scharr, quoted in Lucy Neal, Playing for Time: Making Art as if the World Mattered , 260.
An Invitation to Imagine the Future
Let's create a future archive of the successes of our actions today.
From a point 30, 40, or 50 years in the future, write a speech celebrating the success of one action responding to the climate emergency. How did that action--which could enact change at the personal, municipal, national, or international level--help build a sustainable, collaborative, ethical, and just transition to a post-fossil-fuel world?
Your speech might begin with the sentence: “A different future was possible, but it had to be first imagined as a conscious collective public act."*
Please email your speech to Tom King, for posting on this website. Thank you.
*This beautiful sentence was written by Lucy Neal, in Playing for Time: Making Art as if the World Mattered , 8.