A pleasure having coordinated a series of events in teh last two weeks with our most recent Climate Futures in Digital Cultures fellow, the researcher and film director Juan Francisco Salazar. We learned a lot about speculative storytelling and “tomorrowing” for a planet under the conditions of multiple anthropogenic forcings.
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FILM SCREENING: “Cosmographies” (2025)
Followed by a talk with director Juan Francisco Salazar
Tuesday, June 9 / 7–9 pm / SCALA cinema, Lüneburg
The struggle for environmental justice against ongoing extractivism and ecological ruin in the Atacama Desert becomes an allegory against plans to colonise the Moon and Mars, where Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon finds solace in 2051. A collaboration with artist Victoria Hunt, produced with the Indigenous Lickanantay Community of Toconao in Chile.
Australia/Chile, 2025 · 94 min · 4K DCI · 16:9 · colour · Dolby 5.1 sound
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WORKSHOP: A Poetics of Tomorrowing: Research as Storytelling
Wednesday, June 10 / 10 am–12 pm / C12.101
Using the film Cosmographies as a prompt, this interactive workshop explores frameworks that blur the boundaries between research and storytelling, translating complex information into public engagement. Aimed at academic researchers, documentary filmmakers, science communicators, and graduate students, it runs as a series of experimental improvisations in which participants design conceptual tools to translate empirical research into speculative narratives, moving beyond traditional data reporting toward affective, future-oriented storytelling.
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TALK: Outer Space Futures Otherwise
Tuesday, June 16th / 2 – 4 pm / C40.146
In context of increasingly conflicting visions for human futures in outer space a polysemic understanding is urgent to note the intricately entangled vertical political ecology that traverses from Earth’s inner core and mantle, through and across Earth’s oceans and surfaces, up into lower Earth orbit, further on to the Moon, and into deep space. In bringing to the fore the urgency of questioning how the hegemonic formations of outer space might be broken apart and be given new meanings and political directions, this lecture queries those frameworks that reproduce ongoing historical harms from the exploitation of people and nature on Earth. The presentation follows from the screening and workshop to call for new forms for imagining and enacting space futures otherwise. Understanding outer space as method is also a provocation to highlight the violence of colonialism and racism that still envelops so much work on and in space.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Juan Francisco Salazar is Director (Interim) of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, where he is Professor of Media and Environment and a past Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2020–2024). His recent books include the co-edited Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space (Routledge, 2023), the co-authored Antarctic Cities: From Gateways to Global Custodians (University of Nebraska Press, 2026), and Space Futures Otherwise (forthcoming, Routledge). His latest film, Cosmographies (2025), is a collaboration with artist Victoria Hunt, produced with the Indigenous Lickanantay Community of Toconao in Chile.
