Climate Storytelling 2075
Volume III
Aandishah Tehzeeb Samara
〰️
Brandon McWilliams
〰️
Earl Lin
〰️
Genesis Whitlock
〰️
Aandishah Tehzeeb Samara 〰️ Brandon McWilliams 〰️ Earl Lin 〰️ Genesis Whitlock 〰️
Isabela Valencia
〰️
Jasmine Singh
〰️
Jayshawn Lee
〰️
Khenzom
〰️
Isabela Valencia 〰️ Jasmine Singh 〰️ Jayshawn Lee 〰️ Khenzom 〰️
Kikelomo
〰️
Lorena James
〰️
Mala
〰️
Mary Kate Cleary
〰️
Kikelomo 〰️ Lorena James 〰️ Mala 〰️ Mary Kate Cleary 〰️
Namita Davey
〰️
Pa-Shun Hawkins
〰️
Sophia Francesco
〰️
Sophia Steele
〰️
T'Essence Minnitee
〰️
Namita Davey 〰️ Pa-Shun Hawkins 〰️ Sophia Francesco 〰️ Sophia Steele 〰️ T'Essence Minnitee 〰️
Explore Climate Storytelling 2075: Volume III
-
Anger as Medicine
A graphic novel and worldbuilding exercise by Mala (Trishia Frulla)
-
Common Tide
A speculative video essay by T’Essence Minnitee
-
Eco Mythologies: Book One
An interactive poetry installation by Jayshawn Lee
-
In Conversation with Displaced Species: Water Caltrop
A performance work by Lorena James
-
Island Guardians
A children’s climate zine by Sophia Steele
-
Kettle Prayers
A painting and prayer collection by Pa-Shun Hawkins
-
Kobbari
A short fiction work by Namita Davey
-
Mosaic: A Chorus of Futures
An interactive map of place-based stories by Brandon McWilliams
-
Nervoscape
A sculpture installation by Jasmine Singh
-
sTREEt DREAMS: THE BIG ORCHARD
A painting series by Earl Lin
-
Tending the Commons
A speculative fiction project of letters and recipes by Isabela Valencia
-
to return to love / our earthly paradise / we must find rest
A multimedia installation and film essay by Kikelomo
-
Transboundary Futures: Counter Mapping Across Borders and Boundaries
A counter-mapping work by Sophia Francesco
-
2075 Climate Worker Uniform
A speculative garment design for climate workers of the future by Mary Kate Cleary
-
Khenzom
Description goes here -
Aandishah
Description goes here -
Genesis
Description goes here
Anger As Medicine
a cli-fi graphic novel and worldbuilding exercise by
Mala
‘Anger as Medicine’ is a cli-fi graphic novel set in 2075 Far Rockaway, NY and the time leading up to this post-colonial world. Narrated by a dying woman reflecting on the relationships that shaped her and the life she is leaving behind, she traces how anger—often feared, suppressed, and misdirected—became vital medicine during the climate crises of the mid-21st century.
This installation and digital anthology imagine a desirable climate future as a world who has learned to grieve well. By 2075, communities mourn ecological loss, honor endings, and metabolize rage with the support of indigenous science, organic grids, and a little bit of plant magic.
Discover the place where she takes her last breaths, meet the beings she spends her life with, and imagine into existence a place where we get free together.
‘Anger as Medicine’ invites radical care, presence, and queerness during the moments that surround climate collapse—acknowledging the realities and destruction of the world humans have created for themselves, and the real capacity we have to act and do something different.
By facing anger and imagining it as a renewable resource while embracing the interdependence needed to make lasting change, we can grow our capacities to rest and repair, tend to the ecology of our bodies, and support sustainable relationships between ourselves, earth, and future generations.
COMMON TIDE
a speculative visual essay by
T’Essennce Minnitee
Common Tide is a speculative visual essay set in Cambria, California, in 2075. Narrated by Aisha, the film follows a future shaped not by a single technological breakthrough, but by generations of people learning how to listen to the ocean and to one another. Through memories of her grandmother and mother, Aisha describes the shoreline as a source of knowledge, kelp as both a living inheritance and a language, and stewardship as a responsibility shared across generations.
In this future, the Commons is a community system for distributing kelp, supplies, knowledge, and care. Technology supports that system by helping people recognize changes in the water, but it does not replace human judgment or ancestral understanding. The film imagines Black communities not as victims on the margins of the climate crisis, but as ocean stewards, conservation leaders, and designers of regenerative futures.
Visually, Common Tide combines natural light, tactile coastal imagery, and grounded Afrofuturist details. Aisha floating in the Pacific, harvesting kelp, watching seabirds, and preparing a storm reserve reveals a future that feels lived-in rather than distant. Its quietness is intentional: the work resists the idea that climate futures must be defined only by catastrophe or spectacle.
I want viewers to leave with a broader understanding of what climate infrastructure can be. It can include tools and systems, but it can also include trust, memory, restraint, reciprocity, and collective care. Common Tide asks us to consider what we are passing forward, whose knowledge we choose to value, and how the future will remember us.
Eco-Mythologies:
Book One
an interactive poetry installation by
Jayshawn Lee
Eco Mythologies: Book One is a monumental sculptural book, four feet in scale, built from wood, metal, paper, and paint. Its covers are constructed like the boards of a real book, weighted and hinged, but built to human proportions; its pages open into a room-sized landscape you can walk into rather than hold in your hands.
The medium is "poetry by way of." Wood, metal, paper, and paint are all means for language and remain the physical foundation here. Each material becomes a way of giving that language a physical prosody.
One page holds an original eco myth; poetry, speculative narrative, and monoprinted imagery layered directly into the wood and paper of the page itself, so that text and image share the same surface rather than sitting side by side. The opposite page is left visibly, intentionally incomplete: raw material, waiting marks, space that reads as unfinished rather than empty.
Visitors are invited to write, draw, and print directly onto it, using the tools and marks the installation provides. Over the course of the exhibition, that page fills, and the book itself changes shape.
The result is a book that does not stay fixed. It records what one voice made and leaves room for many more; by the end of its time on view, its unfinished page carries handwriting, drawings, and marks from strangers who walked through the space and decided to stay long enough to add something to share eco-wisdom archived into the future.
In Conversation with Displaced Species:
Water Caltrop
a performance by
Lorena James
In Conversation with Displaced Species: Water Caltrop is a multidisciplinary performance and wearable art piece – choreography, music, fashion, and poetry – staged at the water's edge in dialogue with a plant carried by many names: water caltrop, singhara, 菱角 (líjiǎo), bat nut, devil pod, of the genus Trapa.
Water Caltrop is a floating aquatic plant native to the freshwaters of Europe, Africa, and Asia, where for centuries it has fed festivals, street markets, and family tables – roasted on sidewalks in Italy, folded into Mid-Autumn Festival dishes, gathered along the shores of Lake Victoria. In the waterways of the northeastern and mid-Atlantic United States, that same plant is invasive and can cause harm to native biodiversity: its dense floating mats shade out native plants, deplete dissolved oxygen, and choke habitats that native species depend on. This ecological harm is real; however, we ask you, the viewer, to consider how we can hold that harm alongside everything else the plant is: a source of nourishment, a piece of cultural memory, a living thing that did not choose to cross an ocean, but finds itself a lost traveler.
The performer wears a headdress built from the plant's own architecture – two curved horns echoing the seed pod that gives water caltrop its nicknames "bat nut" and "devil pod" – paired with a necklace of dried seed pods and a flowing skirt, moving through natural space in choreography that traces the same arc as a scientific invasion curve with slow attentiveness.
This piece argues for a more holistic and culturally adaptive lens on invasive and displaced species: one where protecting native biodiversity and honoring a plant's history in the places it came from aren't opposing goals, but two things careful management can hold at once.
Kettle Prayers
a painting and prayer collection by
Pa-Shun Hawkins
[laceholder
Mosaic:
A Chorus of Futures
an interactive map of place-based stories by
Brandon McWilliams
Mosaic is a story of place. It is a story rooted in the city and lands and waters of present-day Seattle, in western Washington, on the ancestral home of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot People. It is a snapshot of a possible moment, told through glimpses into the lives of the people that call this future place home. It is a whole story, inherently incomplete, made up of fragments.
While each story is set in a positive future, the people in them are not always happy. Positive does not mean perfect. Life is messy and no one is always pleased - some people’s most honest expression of themselves is when they are a bit grumpy. Stressors still happen; trees still fall on fences, laws are still imperfect, and many, many challenges still loom even in a better future. The key, though, is that these moments of turbulence are balanced by joy, by care, and by progress. This piece does not engage with utopia - which is inherently unattainable - but is instead grappling with protopia.
Each fragment is plotted directly onto a contemporary map of Seattle. There is no linear path to these stories - just like there is no straightforward story of a place or to the future we are working towards. You are welcome to explore these stories as you like - maybe a narrative will emerge for you. Try to unfocus the eye of your imagination and see what shape emerges when you let each fragment blur together. Or think of each piece as a frame in a flip book. What begins to move as you let the moments flip by?
Nervoscape
a sculpture installation by
Jasmine Singh
Regulation is not synonymous with calm. It is not about becoming emotionally flat or eliminating discomfort. It is about becoming more malleable — expanding our capacity to move through different emotional states without needing to escape them. Our society has turned healing into a commodity, making us believe it can be achieved through consumption. Capitalism feeds off dysregulation, rewarding self-sacrifice and self-erasure. Our attention is currency in this world of pseudo-healing. I realized what I was being told was not working for me. I could not regulate myself in a dysregulated environment, so I stopped burning at both ends and decided to come home to myself.
Nervoscape is me reclaiming this narrative for myself and for everyone exhausted by over-consumption, over-productivity, and over-everything. Our dysregulation mirrors the exhaustion of our planet, but we can choose differently.
sTREEt DREAMS:
THE BIG ORCHARD
a painting series by
Earl Lin
How can we decarbonize cities? Can we go beyond net-zero and enable cities to be restorative to nature?
IMy vision for a positive climate future of 2075 is a future of New York City where the buildings are like trees and the city is an urban forest, inspired by the article “Buildings like trees, city like forest”. Flowers bloom on leaves-covered building facades. Green roofs with solar panels generate clean energy and increase biodiversity. Buildings and infrastructure are connected through thermal energy networks that share energy like the root systems of a forest. The city is powered by clean energy and filled with trees that sequester carbon and promotes plant and animal life. Urban dwellers are reconnected with nature.
Equally inspired by a recent trip to visit family in Fuzhou, China, I experienced a city with tree-lined streets, plant-covered bridge columns, and platoons of electric vehicles. I was deeply moved by the ink paintings I saw in a bookstore-turned-art gallery and in the museums of SanFangQiXiang. Three types of ink art inspired me the most: calligraphy with its loose, expressive brushstrokes, shanshui (mountain water) with its how it appreciates the majesty of nature, and huanaiohua (flower-bird painting) with how it highlights the relationships between plant and animal. This project has a version of these three types: Nas’ “Street Dreams,” reimagined and written with Xu Bing’s square word calligraphy, a pigeon admiring a building covered in leaves (huaniao), and different views of New York City skyline (shanshui).
My favorite thing about growing up in Brooklyn and experiencing New York City was witnessing people from all walks of life and backgrounds coexisting. New York City is the intersection of cultures, like a chunky stew with ingredients and flavors from all over the world. In that same spirit, this project mixes the arts, combining Chinese ink painting, hip-hop, calligraphy, and pen and ink art. Through this project I hope to inspire hope for a positive climate future and to reframe New York City from the big apple, as a place to chase riches, to the big orchard, as a place to tend to and connect with nature.
Tending the Commons
a speculative narrative cookbook by
Isabela Valencia
“Tending to the Commons” is a speculative fiction project consisting of letters and recipes set in the year 2075. The work follows six farmers and their families across Greece, Spain, and Indonesia who are connected through a global farmers’ network. They write to one another as the land that sustains them changes.
The ecological changes are clear. Near Kalamata, olive trees are struggling through longer droughts and hotter seasons. Around Murcia, oranges grow smaller as water becomes less certain. In the highlands above Pangalengan, tea shifts toward cooler elevations, while along the Indonesian coast, saltwater moves farther inland. Still, the characters cook. They lose familiar ingredients, find substitutions, and share recipes across borders.
Each recipe card includes a small note about what is missing. A variety of tomato that no longer sets fruit in the heat, fresh dill that has become unreliable, the taste of honey from a hillside whose flowering season has changed. These absences are folded into the recipe instructions, pairing grief with adaptation, and practicality with memory.
Tending to the Commons asks what we choose to carry forward when growing food becomes harder. What does it mean to make room for change without forgetting what came before? Instead of presenting climate change through data or disaster, the installation brings it into the kitchen in the form of a swapped ingredient, a saved seed, and a notebook with scrawled notes.
to return to love / our earthly paradise / we must find rest
a multimedia installation and film essay by
Kikelomo
to return to love, our earthly paradise, we must find rest is a physical archive and videopoem that portrays the landscape of a bedroom that exudes black girlhood and the dreams that come to fruition.
This piece of work invites viewers to see the space as a place of rest and sacredness. There is care that is seeded to make our places free from harm. It poses the question if that is what we are meant to do to our homes, what about our bigger home at large – the Earth.
Through the videopoem, the viewer enters the dreamscape of the person’s bedroom and can get a peak of what it means to always be changing and find love on this earth with the earth. The piece asks the question if rest is resistance, what happens after it?