Planetary Imaginaries by Liam Young

Our relationship to the future has forever been filtered through the delirium of our imagined worlds. For centuries, we have fled into fictions to wrestle with the unbearable questions of our own making. Now, at the edge of catastrophe, when the very idea of a future trembles, our generation is called to the quiet, defiant labor of hope, to find light when the world grows dark. Created by director and worldbuilder Liam Young and expanded through collaborations with acclaimed science fiction authors drawn from across the globe, Planetary Imaginaries presents a chorus of stories that sprawl from the microscopic to the planetary. Across films and fragments, movie miniatures and ceremonial costumes, action figures and speculative architectures, the exhibition maps a constellation of fictional worlds, visions of wonderous resistance and new mythologies for an Earth remade. Science fiction has long been our shared rehearsal space for our collective dreams of what might yet be. Yet today, as the slow emergencies of the present unfold, the imagination has grown weary of collapse. Stepping out from the long shadows of the dystopias of futures past the exhibition chronicles a new aesthetic language for this age of consequences, an epoch of Planetary Punk, imaginings of immense undertakings and impossible repairs, of geoengineered skies and restless infrastructures, of humanity grappling with the terrible beauty of the vast restoration projects that lay before us.