Creating The Future

Rachel developed a series of workshops combining arts and crafts with science and ecology to help us imagine positive futures in Finsbury Park as part of The Commons Residency Project  in Finsbury Park.

These workshops aimed to build an informal community in the heart of Finsbury Park, coming together to learn about resilience in response to some of our questions, confusions, concerns and desires for the future. These workshops combined art, craft making, storytelling and scientific data to slow down debate and find more gentle and positive ways of thinking, creating and collaborating.

The workshops drew on Rachel’s previous work creating the ambitious 30 year national project ‘Future Machine & When the Future Comes’; ‘Performing the Future’ that explored how we might think positively about the future in response to climate and environmental change; and the workshop series ‘The Republic of Learning’ – part of “Materialising Data, Embodying Climate Change” a collaboration with Giles Lane, Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London, Proboscis, Birkbeck University of London and NERC British Antarctic Survey.

Some of these workshops took place as part of the Fixing The Future, IoT project with the University of Nottingham.