Crystal Barajas

Imagínate Los Ángeles is a short documentary in Spanish that centers on voices from the artist’s neighborhood. Through simple but profound questions–"Si pudieras imaginarte el futuro, cómo sería?" (“If you could imagine the future, what would it look like?”) and “Cómo imaginas el futuro climático o el medio ambiente?” (“How do you imagine the climate future or the environment?”)—the film invites everyday people to imagine and share their visions of the future. Their responses are compiled and accompanied by English captions to make it accessible to a wider audience.

The work not only documents spoken words but also captures the immediate environment of each interviewee. Storefronts, sidewalks, murals, and the environments of Los Angeles’ streets become part of the narrative, grounding each imaginative response within a lived place. This approach allows viewers to feel both the presence of the speakers and the community they live in.

Shirene Shomloo’s “Astonishing Light" is a photographic meditation on the teachings of resilience from the desert through the lens of the Iranian diaspora. The artist draws on the inherited memory of the deserts of the middle east as home, transposing a trust between the land and the self built over generations to the deserts of southern california. These landscapes are at the frontlines of climate change, with rising temperatures and changing rainy seasons putting added pressure on already strained ecosystems. This scarcity of resources has developed within the habitat a bone-deep ability to adapt. In this photo series, the artist’s body is melded into the landscape, to embrace the topologies and the forms that have allowed flora, fauna, and native peoples of deserts across the world to thrive for thousands of years.

Cindy J. Xie

"Letters on Care" is an epistolary story written in the form of letters between two sisters, separated in childhood by their parents' return migration, in the year 2075. The piece alternates between memories of their past, as well as vignettes from their current work as a public health practitioner and an environmental artist, respectively.

Through an interweaving of planetary crises with personal narrative, the story asks how we bring the impacts of climate change down to the human scale, and what care between individuals and community members looks like in the face of growing uncertainty. Contrasting against universalizing narratives of environmental and climate crisis, small windows into daily life reveal the actions of care we take for ourselves and others as avenues of survival, and resistance.

Kristen Howard

Echoes of Protection: Bottle Tree 2075 is a mixed-media digital installation inspired by the enduring legacy of Southern Black folk traditions, Hoodoo, and West African cosmologies. Drawing from the symbolic bottle trees prominent in southern gardens, the artwork reimagines the traditional blue bottles—believed to capture spirits and shield homes from harm—as luminous digital vessels against a darkened backdrop. Each glowing bottle contains rendered vignettes of preserved ecological memory, invoking both ancestral wisdom and visions of environmental stewardship in a speculative 2075. Through its synthesis of organic form, vibrant color, and immersive light, this piece honors the protective powers ascribed to bottle trees and proposes a future in which honoring nature is synonymous with honoring ancestry and community.

Mariana Castro Azpíroz’s “Caretakers’ New Dictionary” is a zine that uses speculative writing to imagine which terms would be commonly used in 2075 if we lived in her vision of a desirable climate future: centered around ethics of care, arts of noticing, and multispecies kinship.

The piece highlights the power of language in shaping our understanding and relationships with the environment and other beings (of every species). It invites the audience to engage in decolonizing the English language by questioning and reflecting upon the concepts behind current words, challenging the way language is presently being used, and playing with the creation of new vocabulary through generative prompts.

Lovini Summer & Robin Moulton

Surviving the climate crisis is a practice of world building. We build worlds in which our communities thrive and survive. Storytelling and science fiction play the role of making those worlds feel tangible and enticing. Colore is the story of two communities separated by time but experiencing crises that require a shift outside normal survival strategies. In Hallu in 2030, Amanya (or Ami) discovers a fungi that can help enable communication and goods transfer - allowing for the establishment of a mutual aid network. Forty-five years later in the same region, Quinton later rediscovers the network when a hurricane nearly wrecks his way of life. The story answers the question of how we might survive in a future where we face the crises of a collapsing ecosystem fueled by greed and extraction. It imagines nature and place based solutions as methods for survival. Lovinia and Robin contributed their imaginations to the story, each taking a community-world to build. Christine Piolet brings the story to life with vibrant images. This short story is a quick foray into what we hope is a hopeful future.

Farmer Armor draws on the visual language of Harmony Richards’ mixed Japanese and Filipino heritage—symbols like the Filipino flag, the Japanese red sun, hakama pants, and the straw hats worn by Filipino cowboys. These cultural references are woven into the imagined landscapes of California farms, where they meet subtle nods to Americana. The final silhouette of the work is grounded in over 80 hours of field research across several months, during which Richards interviewed agricultural workers about what they might wear in the future. Their stories and visions shaped a narrative that was brought to life using secondhand garments and reclaimed fabric. The result is a piece of speculative workwear—part fantasy, part lived experience. Each element of the outfit was built from reused materials, embodying a patchwork of memory, resilience, and imagination.

An accompanying video deepens the narrative, following a figure farming in a surreal, future landscape. Walking through avocado groves, they wear not just clothing, but the layered hopes and histories of today’s farmworkers.

Project KARTAng-Isip is an act of imaginative cartography, mapping the possible futures of the Philippines through the lens of climate fiction. Borrowing from kathang-isip (fiction) and karta (map), this anthology of short stories envisions the archipelago’s future over the next 50 years, exploring the diverse realities of each region.

The first story, Of Steams & Storms, is set in the Philippines’ Eastern Visayas in the year 2075. The region comprising Leyte, Samar, and Biliran stands at the heart of typhoon landfalls with its landscape cut by the Leyte Fault; however, after decades of disaster, the long-whispered myths of Biringan now emerge as a renewable energy utopia. Through the eyes of Paula, a young Biringan intern, the story follows Eli, a seasoned stormsaver, as they navigate a megatyphoon in a journey to reunite with a long-lost love. At the heart of this work is countermapping, a method of reclaiming space, voice, and vision. The Philippines, consistently among the most vulnerable countries in the world, is often depicted only through the lens of disaster. Project KARTANG-ISIP disrupts that narrative by charting a different map: one where Filipino communities are not merely victims of disasters, but changemakers.

This West African inspired mask and accompanying garment venerates the body of the Cowrie Snail. Through traditions of dance and ritual across Africa, it is common for spiritual beings, deceased family members, and deities to be routinely remembered and honored. The Cowrie Snail’s history exploitation through commodification parallels that of enslaved African people around the continent amidst species endangerment from overharvesting, pollution, and other effects of tourism. This piece acts as a proposal to recognize the Cowrie as an ancestor, healing our related grief through movement and creativity. Using the motifs cultural significance as a symbol of abundance, this piece reminds us to honor our grief within oppressive capitalist systems that feed off of scarcity by remembering what is valuable to us as people. This way, we place our worth and those of living things around us as intrinsic rather than extrinsic, causing us to see ourselves and the world with more care. The future, regardless of the systems that run it, needs more routines that remind communities of their own values and commitments to nature. The artist believes that when these values are the foundations of a community, the world around us can change for the better.