Remembering Climate Futures

Climate change is a global process, but we experience and respond to it in profoundly local ways. Join us to explore creative projects bringing abstract climate projections into the places we inhabit.

Climate change can feel all too remote — we measure it over vast distances and timescales, often disconnected from the particular geographical, social, and ecological settings we inhabit. To inspire action, we need to connect global projections to local contexts. But how can we make abstract data feel concrete and close to home?

Memoria di un Clima Futuro is a site-specific installation in Ticino, Switzerland, which reimagines historical markers as memorials to a speculative climate future, grounded in local data and realistic projections. A series of plaques in public spaces around the town of Porza commemorate future climate events — heatwaves, droughts, floods — as well as the measures that the community takes to adapt. Developed by Jacopo Conti and IAMCLIMATE, the project adapts and expands upon Remembrance of Climate Futures, a series of Boston-area installations initiated by Prof. Thomas Starr of Northeastern University.

Join Swissnex for an interactive conversation on design and place-based climate communication. Conti and Starr will be joined by Prof. Juliette Rooney-Varga, professor of Environmental Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and director of the university’s Climate Change Initiative, and Rachel TonThat, a Salem-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and editor of Impermanent Earth, a digital archive documenting how spaces are transformed by climate change. Together they will explore how we can bridge the gap between abstract data and everyday life and inspire climate action in our communities.