During the summer of 2019, the Art Assassins worked with researcher, curator, and artist Angela Chan.
Together, they developed a new climate fiction comic book that weaves together multiple speculative futures. As part of the research, our group visited an underground farm in south London. The farm, which produces salad sprouts, is both a real experiment in alternative, greener food production and a space that got the group thinking about visualising the future, with its striking purple lighting in the long tunnels.
It inspired both debate on the shortcomings of seemingly ‘green’ ideas and businesses focusing on consumption, and what kinds of locations and technologies could appear in our imaginative climate narratives.
Biography
Angela YT Chan is an independent researcher, curator, and artist. Her work reconfigures power in relation to the inequity of climate change, through self-archiving, rethinking geographies and speculative fiction. Her recent research-art commissions span climate framings, water scarcity and conflict, and has held residencies with Arts Catalyst, FACT/Jerwood Arts’ Digital Fellowship and Sonic Acts’ environmental research residency. Since 2014, Angela has produced curatorial projects and workshops as Worm: art + ecology, collaborating with artists, activists and youth groups. She co-founded the London Chinese Science Fiction Group and co-directs the London Science Fiction Research Community. Angela is also a research consultant, having worked in international climate and cultural policy and on climate and sustainability projects for major cultural institutions. Angela holds a joint honours undergraduate in History of Art and Scandinavian Studies with Norwegian (UCL) and an MA in Climate Change: History, Culture, Society (KCL).
Designs for the Art Assassins’ climate-fiction comic book
A timeline of the Art Assassins’ comic book. Starting with the present day threat of climate change through to a speculative future of underground living!