The international network of artists in Mapping Future Imaginaries explore speculative possibilities and actions toward utopias during times of uncertainty and flux. We imagine future citizens and new civics, de-centred humanity, extraction, consumption, settler-colonial subjectivities, multi-species collaborations, and ways of being with alterity.
This online salon exhibition explores alternatives to current structures and prejudices through speculative projects concerned with deep listening to local habitat, exploring circular economies through performance, and creating spaces for imagining nascent environments. Our cross-elemental collaboratory extends reparative possibilities for other possible climate futures and activates scientific materials to understand how atmospheric knowledge is materialised.
Counter mapping practices provoke explorative ideas and possibilities for future living. We create archaeological, mythopoetic maps, transborder collaborative taxonomies to re-inscribe the world and experiment with posthuman strategies for mapping neighbourhood plants to imagine more-than-human futures.
Collectively we speculate on possible worlds to come by critiquing capitalism’s effects. In asking, how might our relationships with imagined planetary futures be more fruitful if they begin from a process of listening to and drawing from different wisdoms, we experiment with strategies for living in an altered world, improving well-being and supporting system resilience.
Navigation
Explore the salon collection in the image gallery, then read about each of the artist’s works below. Links to video works are included in the project statements and you are encouraged to visit these.
Collaboration and interaction zone
At the base of this page is a link to a Miro Board. Here, you are encouraged to interact with the salon collection by adding your visual and written responses, your own works and provocations. The artists in the Mapping Future Imaginaries salon exhibition have created some provocations to prompt your ideas and experiments. Over time, we expect the Miro Board to extend the themes and ideas in the salon exhibition, and we hope this collaboration and interaction zone will grow into a rich and interesting space of exchange about future imaginaries.
Linda Knight
Lilly Blue Ink Bloom Rising 2 + 2.2 
Jo Pollitt, Maitland Schnaars, Lilly Blue kep waangkiny (still) 
Liana Psarologaki Metatum 2017 
Liana Psarologaki Fabulative Archipelaga 2021 
Liana Psarologaki Spatial Sea 2016 
Kit Wise and Nina Hamilton Species Hotel 2014-2018 Public artwork and community-engaged project 
Kit Wise and Nina Hamilton Species Hotel 2014-2018 Public artwork and community-engaged project 
Kit Wise and Nina Hamilton Species Hotel 2014-2018 Public artwork and community-engaged project 
Kit Wise and Nina Hamilton Species Hotel 2014-2018 Public artwork and community-engaged project 
We Must Imagine Daphne Happy, Sophia Dacy-Cole. Installation detail, Mixed media including: local bay leaf, honey, wax, cotton, tree felled in yard of residency during a storm. Casa Liquida, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2020. 
Pyro Bodies, Mils D-C and Sophia Dacy-Cole. Performance documentation, mixed media interactive performance with locally gathered: food, plants, and soil. Ainslie and Gorman House, Canberra, 2020. 
Pyro Bodies, Mils D-C and Sophia Dacy-Cole. Performance documentation, mixed media interactive performance with locally gathered: food, plants, and soil. Ainslie and Gorman House, Canberra, 2020. 
Megan McPherson Shallow breathing through fog, snap. Relief printed etching on rice paper, pigment ink, glues, pins. 1.2 m x 1m x 0.3m (3 bags, installation variable) 2021 
Megan McPherson Shallow breathing through fog, snap (detail). Relief printed etching on rice paper, pigment ink, glues, pins. 1.2 m x 1m x 0.3m (3 bags, installation variable) 2021 
lynn mowson Museum of Forgotten Objects ‘ceramics’ 
lynn mowson Museum of Carnism ‘bees’ 
lynn mowson Museum of Carnism ‘birds’ 
“Diaspora.” Illuminated video essay (30:48). Ben Spatz with Nazlıhan Eda Erçin, Agnieszka Mendel, and Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz. Photographs by Garry Cook. Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork. First published in Global Performance Studies 2.1 (2018). DOI: 10.33303/gpsv2n1a1 
“Działoszyce: Song, Border, Body.” Illuminated video essay (17:38). Nazlıhan Eda Erçin with Agnieszka Mendel and Ben Spatz. Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork. First presented at the First International Ecoperformance Festival, Taanteatro Companhia, São Paulo, Brazil (2021). 
“whiteness.” Illuminated video essay (11:29). Ben Spatz with Nazlıhan Eda Erçin, Ilona Krawczyk, and Agnieszka Mendel. Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork. 
Benjamin Sheppard Scribble Me This… (Man Standing Right) 2020- pens on paper 210 (approx.) x 115 x 10 cm 
Benjamin Sheppard Scribble Me This… (ingenious) 2021- pens on paper 56 x 77 cm 
Benjamin Sheppard Scribble Me This… (Pardalote) 2016- pens on paper 56 x 77 cm 
Husberg & Marzecova Towards Atmospheric Care From Aurora to Geospace 
Husberg & Marzecova Towards Atmospheric Care From Aurora to Geospace 
An Introduction to the Center For Post-Capitalist History Single channel video with voiceover Duration 2 minutes and 56 seconds Leah Sandler, Created in collaboration with designer Britta Seizums Davis, voice actor Jared Silvia, videographer Kyle Smith, voice actor Genevieve Steele, and video editor Zach Trebino. 2021 
An Introduction to the Center For Post-Capitalist History Single channel video with voiceover Duration 2 minutes and 56 seconds Leah Sandler, Created in collaboration with designer Britta Seizums Davis, voice actor Jared Silvia, videographer Kyle Smith, voice actor Genevieve Steele, and video editor Zach Trebino. 2021 
An Introduction to the Center For Post-Capitalist History Single channel video with voiceover Duration 2 minutes and 56 seconds Leah Sandler, Created in collaboration with designer Britta Seizums Davis, voice actor Jared Silvia, videographer Kyle Smith, voice actor Genevieve Steele, and video editor Zach Trebino. 2021 
Perdita Phillips .–. / .- / .- (Penguin Anticipatory Archive) 2013-2014 Archive (digital prints and mixed media drawings in bound box) Box 31.5 x 31.5, prints and drawings 21 x 21 cm 
Perdita Phillips Anticipatory terrain (capricious dreams) 2017 Digital image as part of research. Video installation: two looped videos with stereo sound and subwoofer in black box space. 
Perdita Phillips -ing 2016 Project drawing as part of research 29.7 x 42 cm 
Perdita Phillips No title (work in progress only) 2021 
Jacklyn Brickman & Kathryn Nusa Logan The Department of Planetary Futures Seed Simulation Laboratory and Mission Nucleus, 2021 
Jacklyn Brickman & Kathryn Nusa Logan The Department of Planetary Futures Seed Simulation Laboratory and Mission Nucleus, 2021 
Jacklyn Brickman & Kathryn Nusa Logan The Department of Planetary Futures Seed Simulation Laboratory and Mission Nucleus, 2021 
Jacklyn Brickman & Kathryn Nusa Logan The Department of Planetary Futures Seed Simulation Laboratory and Mission Nucleus, 2021 
Ilaria Vanni & Alexandra Crosby (Mapping Edges) ‘The Planty Atlas of UTS’, printed map and special edition book. Photograph by Karina Glasby 
Ilaria Vanni & Alexandra Crosby (Mapping Edges) ‘Marrickville Walks: Walk 3, Dragonfruit’ page 1. 
Sarah Jane Moore Memories of the Black Swan Ochre, Bloodwood Tree sap, gold leaf, mutton bird oil, river clay, ground oyster shells, She-Oak charcoal, Troona River Clay and acrylic on primed canvas panel. Carrying Futures 
Sarah Jane Moore Carrying futures Mutton bird oil, river clay, ochre, acrylic, crystal and Killercrankie beach pebbles on primed canvas panel 
Kimbal Bumstead Sonic Landscapes (detail). 
Kimbal Bumstead Sonic Landscapes. Digital mapping 
Kimbal Bumstead Sonic Landscapes (detail). 
Alys Longley (NZ), Nipan Oranwessna (Thailand), Paul Hughes (UK), Meng Qu (Thailand) 
Envelope Number 12 Alys Longley and Jeffrey Holdaway 
Envelope Number 6 Alys Longley (NZ), Jeffrey Holdaway (NZ), Richard Orjis (NZ), Linda Knight (Aus) 
Linda Knight Extinct: Mount Glorious torrent frog / worba (Wakka Wakka & Gubbi Gubbi). 2022. Pencil on paper. 
Linda Knight Long-footed potoroo / winnenerbee (Gunai). 2020. Pencil on paper. 
Liana Psarologaki Hydor 2018 
Liana Psarologaki
Drawings and moving image are positioned at the intersection of fine art and architecture. A preoccupation with the concept of immanence and Bergsonian time as chronos and aion helps create achronous maps that are based on archaeological, mythopoetic and contemporary references. The maps are imaginative and evoke personal affective redolence of place.
Kit Wise & Nina Hamilton
Species Hotels was a public art work and school engagement curatorial project that engaged artists, designers and scientists at the University of Tasmania with the specific Midlands community and local school of Ross, Tasmania. It fosters connections with students, research candidates and academic staff to help restore native animals’ habitats. In doing so, it developed innovative approaches to curriculum design in tertiary and primary education contexts; as well as models of interdisciplinary collaboration between science, art, design and education, addressing place-based and environmental concerns.
Sophia Dacy-Cole & Mills Dacy-Cole
We create interactive performances that critically explore food sources with locally-gathered food, plants, and soil. In 2022, we are thinking with soil. We are learning from the Fawkner Food Bowls Community Garden about how, in the midst of serving their community through a lockdown food crisis, they discovered that their soil was poisoned. We are learning about the work that is done to, and with, poisoned soil. We are learning about the plants that ease poison. We are learning about the world that emerges when we ease into relation with the strange others that give us life.
Megan McPherson
In this series of paper bag art works, I attend to the measuring of emotional and cognitive affects of being in a place and space. I work with the notion of unease, how it is carried with us, and how it is gauged. I am considering how this affective heaviness permeates what we do. Voluminously heavy and weightless, all at the same time; these leaky paper bags are made to measure and carry anxious thoughts.
lynn mowson
mowson’s Museum of Carnism and Museum of Forgotten Objects negotiates the well worn museological trope of the future museum (utopian and dystopian) as a method to recontextualise and destablise the meanings of contemporary objects related to the consumption of animals, in all its forms.
Ben Spatz with Nazlıhan Eda Erçin and Agnieszka Mendel
Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork maps potential futures for the laboratory as a site of complex making and for the audiovisual document as means of knowledge transmission beyond logicentrism. The Judaica project explores contemporary (jewish) identity in an ethnotechnical mode, seeking to invent new ways of doing and being jewishness in a critical materialist and decolonial frame.
Benjamin Sheppard
Scribble Me This… is an ongoing and unfinishable project that offers in-progress works on paper as registrations of national identity construction. Developed out of a PhD (which concluded that it can’t conclude) the notion of fixed group representation, of an identity so multi-faceted and historically problematic as the contemporary Australian, is challenged by this continuum of open-ended works. An invisible world of nebulous ideas and contemplations are made visible in a continuum of marks made as if registering a personal thought process–like an after-image of the mind captured on paper.
Towards Atmospheric Care
The artists Hanna Husberg and Agata Marzecova have produced an Atlas of Auroral Forms to critically explore atmospheric ethics and futures.
Leah Sandler
A speculation on a possible world to come, a critique of capitalism’s effects on the body is explored through my para-fictional research institute, the Center for Post-Capitalist History. Existing through conceptual and performative practices, CPCH presents the viewer with a thoroughly branded corporate identity implying the existence of a real institution with a goal of creating new methods of writing history during times of extremis.
Perdita Phillips
I see one role as an artist is to create spaces for imagining alternative environmental futures; of creating ‘anticipatory archives’ not already in existence. One strategy is to fold the past into the present and further, looking at what might have been perceived as an archive or place where records are kept as a story about the past. Flipping time to make the past talk of the future, and through fiction make what is not yet envisaged, part of what is already chronicled.
Jacklyn Brickman & Kathryn Nusa Logan
A speculative entity situated within The Department of Planetary Futures, the The Seed Simulation Laboratory and Mission Nucleus asks: How might our relationships with imagined planetary futures be more fruitful if they begin from a process of listening to and drawing from the wisdom of plants? How might humans and nature be better served collectively if humans practice plant-based survival tactics? What are the human bodily limitations in attempts to practice seed dispersal mechanisms as a human survival tactic? https://www.jacklynbrickman.com/seed-simulation-laboratory
Mapping Edges
Ilaria Vanni and Alexandra Crosby, as Mapping Edges created The Plantiness of Bankstown to take the plants living in the neighbourhood as a starting point for imagining a more than human future. Mapping Edges designs experiences and artefacts for exploring and extending the relationship between plants and people in cities.
Sarah Jane Moore
Deep listening and learning manifests from manipulating and re-interpreting the natural world. Tapping into the memories that land holds for us opens dialogues that may have been sleeping. Mapping networks, stories and connections for Moore is about grinding materials and harvesting from mother earth. Developing songs and images that imagine life before the humming of concrete, enable old and elusive stories to be told and heard. Imagining new ways to tell old stories becomes a life-long pursuit.
Kimbal Bumstead
Sonic Landscapes is a participatory project which explores the physicality of drawing as a tool to tune into and represent embodied experiences of sonic environments. How does the sound around us make us feel, and how does that feeling translate into drawing? The project consists of contributions from people around the world in the form of drawings and audio recordings, woven together into an audio collage and a map of an imaginary sonic landscape. This work is about deep listening, and exploring how creative practice offers a chance to re-mix or re-imagine the spaces and places we inhabit.
Jo Pollitt, Maitland Schnaars & Lilly Blue
Feminist Responses to Climate Change features work developed across three Western Australian research collaboratories: Water, Weather, and Waste, to extend reparative possibilities for alternative climate futures. These works connect here as a duet of print and video work, ink bloom rising by Lilly Blue and kep waanginy by Jo Pollitt, Mailtand Schnaars & Lilly Blue, to reveal movements of complex Weather and Water bodies as vital to thinking with future imaginaries. https://vimeo.com/371526014
Alys Longley, Linda Knight, and Máximo Corvalán-Pincheira
A Tilting Body of Precarious Maps by Alys Longley, Linda Knight, Máximo Corvalán-Pincheira, in collaboration with artists from across the world is a series of maps. Co-created through strategies aimed at bringing artists to touch across borders in times of extraordinary border control, the postal artworks to allow our touches to meet across time. Digital maps collaboratively re-write the world. We consider each of these strategies for envisaging future utopias and co-imagining new possibilities for connection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVJWtPeb6ag&t=23s
Linda Knight
Mapping Extinction speculates on how we might map nature and wildlife in future. Taking the devastating effects of the 2020 Australian bushfires as a starting point, the dis-located specimen drawings in their blue colour are a deliberate pun on the idea of recording something in perpetuity. The works comment on the long-term impacts of colonisation on Indigenous lands, enacted through the catastrophic effects of bushfires that occur more frequently due to improper land knowledge and management.
Mapping Future Imaginaries salon exhibition – collaboration and interaction zone
Click the link to access the Miro board. Once in the board, you will be able to access basic instructions on how to post notes and upload images: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVO0cUyDI=/?share_link_id=623122784800
Mapping Future Imaginaries 