Restoring our senses, restoring the Earth. Fostering imaginative capacities through the Arts for envisioning climate transformations

• Humanity has never lived in a world where global average temperature is above two degrees of current levels. Moving towards such High-End Climate Change (HECC) futures is likely to involve high uncertainty, non-linear dynamics in global ecologies and a fundamental challenge to current governance structures. Responding to such a world will require more than technical and conventional solutions. We depart in this paper from the notion that human imagination may be a central capacity to support multiple learning processes necessary in triggering transformative change. We developed a three-years long art-based approach to knowledge co-creation  We explore the possibilities of fostering with the intention to boost imaginative capacities in support to the development of transformative societal visions. The process combines a range of performative, visual and reflexive practices with the ambition to reach out to more-than-rational but also practical elements of future visioning processes. The empirical case was realized alongside a science-led participatory knowledge co-creation process within the EU project IMPRESSIONS, in the Iberian Peninsula. Our analysis focuses on the ways in which this art-based approach brought new ways of seeing, feeling and interpreting the world given the present climate challenge. The approach supported participants in the development of a sensibility towards the future and suggested ways in which the future can be made present in order to empower and infuse action. 

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Övrig annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Other Humanities not elsewhere specified (hsv//eng)

Keyword

art-based research

social-ecological

art-science

high-end climate change

knowledge coproduction

action-research

transdisciplinarity

Sustainability Science

vetenskap om hållbar utveckling

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)