This exhibition showcases interdisciplinary, collaborative work produced by the participants of the multi-year research-creation project Speculative Energy Futures (SEF). SEF brings together artists, activists, designers, engineers, scientists, humanists, social scientists, policy makers, Indigenous legal experts and more, to inquire into the complex intersections of climate change and energy transition, as interlocking sites of possibility.
SEF’s artist-researchers hail from across Turtle Island; the project is coordinated out of the University of Alberta on Treaty Six Territory, the traditional home of 48 different Indigenous nations: First Nations, Métis and Inuit. The City of Edmonton, where the University is situated and where our team has gathered to share its prototype exhibition, is located on lands long ago stolen from Papaschase and Métis peoples who were displaced through means and methods that led to, and ongoingly enact, the loss of culture and lives. We acknowledge our nation’s history of genocidal practices and assert that conflict over energy and natural resources have played, and continues to play, a starring role in this history. As we think through ecological, climate and energy justice, the Speculative Energy Futures team understands that there is no social or ecological justice without decolonization and Indigenization. An anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-speciesist worldview is necessary to combat the extractivist world-view that has contributed to climate change through the exploitation of land and resources, and that has likewise relied upon the exploitation of gendered, classed and racialized bodies, as well as the erasure of knowledge held by those bodies. This is why we argue that feminist and decolonial approaches to energy transition are vital. This exhibit is a proto-exploration of where alliances can be formed: where feminist and socially just and multi-species and Indigenous ways of thinking might come together. It is about the synergies and solidarities that we can nurture as we face the daunting challenges of climate change.
Check out this page for the Prototypes for Possible Worlds exhibition pamphlet
