Part of Homemakers Festival - June 2020
Could this crisis make another world possible?
As part of Homemakers Festival 2020 we are engaging with households across the UK. A pack of postcards with instructions for improvising alternative futures will be sent to each ticketholder.
Initiated by HOME and funded through their Response Fund, Homemakers is series of new commissions inviting artists to create new works at home, for an audience who are also at home.
What do we miss about our old lives and what would we like to replace and transform?
Designed to stimulate reflection and conversation amongst households, families and friends, these cards offer participants the dream space to imagine how we would like our world to be different when we re-emerge from lockdown.
Love Letters to a Liveable Future: The Show
Research and collaboration are at the heart of everything we do. The inspirations and ideas resulting from people’s interactions with the postcards are informing the design of our new live performance work: Love Letters to a Liveable Future. This brand new live show is happening at the Cambridge Junction on 21 & 22 July 2021. Join us to imagine our way out of the climate crisis and into a new future.
Find out more about the showtaking care
Through the sale of these cards we raised £700 for the Arthur Rank Hospice in Cambridge.
All future funds raised will be donated to Afri-co-lab a community interest company based in St Leonards-On-Sea, East Sussex. The project is co-led by our long term collaborator, Anna-Maria Nabirye.
What do we dream of, out there on the other side of crisis?
Love Letters to a Liveable Future will offer the dream space to imagine how we would like our world to be different when we re-emerge from lockdown. This time-sensitive work uses the current context to co-create a vision of an alternative future of human and planetary flourishing. Culture has rehearsed us in imagining the disaster-movie version of events, and this virus plays into those scenarios, but what if we allow ourselves to imagine otherwise? Could this crisis make another world possible?
What do we really want our world to be like? What do we miss about our old lives, and what would we like to replace and transform? Who will we be when we leave the house once more? & what world would we like to encounter?
Love Letters to a Liveable Future is part an ongoing process of ‘research-in-public’ in which different voices and conversations are continuously added to the artwork and inform future iterations of the project including a live improvised theatre performance planned for late 2020.
The project investigates how everyday life might look, function and feel in a culture that has been reconfigured for human and environmental flourishing. However, it decisively does not create a single ‘utopia’ that predicts or prescribes. Rather it offers overlapping and sometimes contradictory scenarios, based on multiple perspectives, different disciplines and backgrounds. What matters in the project is the act of imagining – the content of the stories is constantly revised and built upon, as different voices input into its vision.
An evolution...
Love Letters to a Liveable Future is another stage in the evolution of our work to ‘imagine otherwise’. Through research, collaboration and performance work we are imagining alternatives to the current global economic order, in the context of environmental planetary destruction.
