Paper short abstract:

Paper explores anthropology’s speculative potential through an ethnography of urban climate change adaptation. It focuses on speculative art and design as forms of translation and negotiation of climate adaptation goals in Warsaw. It asks if and how the urgency of climate change is being invoked.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper suggests to explore the modes of engagement with anticipation in anthropological inquiry and the role anthropology’s own speculative potential by reflecting on a particular case study: an ethnography of urban climate change adaptation that engages not only with the events and processes that actually take place or the actors who exist but also with the plans, failed projects, and anticipations as well as imagined or hoped for actors.

The paper focuses on speculative art and design as a form of navigation, translation and negotiation of climate adaptation goals in and for the cities. Specifically, it zooms in on if and how the urgency of climate change is being invoked through speculative art and design practices as well as related objects and discourses.

Speculative art and design that engage with climate change take on the modalities of provocation, inspiration, evocation or revelation. They bring multiple potential futures into the present and make them objects of affect. The speculative work they do appears to have a high potential of urgency invocation.

I rely on the ethnographic research among artists, designers and cultural entrepreneurs in Warsaw who directly address climate change in their work as well as on the interpretation of their projects in examining the invocation of urgency. Specifically, I focus on the art and design work from the public competition ‘Futuwawa’ whose goal was to imagine and project the capital of the future.