Brick

A long time ago, I read a book that imagined a different future called “Albion”. Ideas from this book reappear in my thoughts often. One of the ideas was that when someone needed a new home, they had to wait for bricks from a building that was no longer being used to become available. I love the idea of our future selves appreciating materials as things to be reused again and again, that we would require some patience to get what we wanted and that we reuse and remake with care. A brick can be reused but also can eventually disintegrate back into the earth when it is finally worn out. This way of doing things also means that the built landscape would be forever evolving. I imagine that more people will live at sea or on water. Some of us will be sea nomads, crossing the oceans and occasionally returning to land. When we leave land, our homes can be unbuilt and then rebuilt for someone else.

Glass Box

Those of us who will live on the oceans must be able to sustain ourselves to be free to travel for weeks or months at a time. It is our duty as ocean dwellers to leave no trace and produce as little non-organic waste as possible. Therefore, we must grow on our boats. Every boat-home would have a large glass box attached to it in some way. This glass box would be a hydroponic growing box, a greenhouse, with a desalination system which would allow for each sea-household to produce the majority of its food. By this point in the future, each child would have been taught how to grow at school – a lesson which is regarded with as much importance as maths or science. At night, you can lie on the ground amongst your plants and look up at the stars and dream.

Sound Equipment

We live at sea and yet, until now, we have found it difficult to communicate with our neighbors; the whales, the dolphins, the puffins, the rays, the coral. our new sound equipment allows us to listen and understand though. It translates what is being said. We can listen, but we cannot speak. It’s not our place to speak. This equipment enables us to hear their concerns, their asks, their wishes and their kindness which will allow us to live harmoniously with them and readdress the balance of years of intrusion into their world. We can’t speak through this as already our myriad forms of pollution have changed and often destroyed their carefully balance world. Not only will this allow us to live well alongside them, it will be a window into this magical world.

Fish

The fish has for thousands of years been a food for us humans. In this future world, they are our gods. We respect and worship these creatures who navigate the world beneath the waves with magical natural powers that they have harnessed since the beginning of time. We need them to guide us around the oceans. They teach us everything. Each fish has a different journey and different powers. We marvel at them and know that we are inferior and simple in contrast to complex creatures who understand their role in the universe.

Rubber Duck

The rubber duck is a piece inspected in museums. It represents a past that our future selves cannot believe. Why had our predecessors made so many pointless things that we have no way of disposing of? The rubber duck is a symbol to represent the billions of tonnes of plastic that we have to live amongst, which festers and harms us, for what? A few moments of fun? A convenient snack on the go, packaged in plastic that will exist in our world forever? Us ocean dwellers are most aware of these harms. We still see rubber ducks float past us occasionally, swimming through our soup of microplastics, dense with the fragments of plastic waste they so carelessly used, discarded and forgot about.

Central Territory: Still Water