Future Imaginaries, London 2026
Exploring our futures through Live Art
1B Window Gallery, Coppermill Lane, Walthamstow, London E17 7HA
Wednesday 29 July to Sunday 2 August 2026 – Daily Actions
Future Imaginaries is a five-day live art and participatory programme hosted at 1B Window Gallery, a small but mighty high-street creative space in the heart of Walthamstow. Each day the space is activated with a participatory work that invites passers-by and local communities to think, feel, and respond to a single question:
“What does our collective future look like?”
The exhibition window and street a vessel for participation into the collective imagination.
SPACE
1B is an 85 sq ft window gallery on Coppermill Lane, one minute from St James Street Overground. Its large windows make the entire interior visible from the street, 24 hours a day.
The pavement in front is our stage to engage the public in a daily programme of interactive live art creating new ways to imagine the future.
PROGRAMME
DAY 1: FUTURE VISA CENTRE
WEDNESDAY 29 JULY 4PM TO 8PM
Future Visa Centre is a fictional immigration office that imagines a future where migration is no longer limited to movement between countries, but becomes a process of entering new forms of experience, perception, and possibility.
Through participation and performance, Future Visa Centre transforms the idea of a migration office into a space for imagining alternative forms of movement. It explores how migration can be understood not only as a physical journey, but also as a process of transformation, translation, and becoming.
ARTIST: Dongting Huang (DongDong) is a Chinese-born, London-based artist working across performance, moving image, installation, and participatory practice. Their practice explores how perception, participation, and material processes shape shifting systems of meaning. Through the use of trace, repetition, and transformation, their work constructs environments in which stability dissolves and form remains in flux. Their practice engages the body as a relational node within dynamic material and sensory systems, where it is continuously shaped through interaction. Increasingly, their practice approaches participation as a generative condition, where meaning and form emerge through interactions between human and non-human actors.
DAY 2: THE SPACE COUNCIL – COMPLAINTS DEPARTMENT
THURSDAY 30 JULY 4PM TO 8PM
ARTIST: Zelda Solomon (they/them) is an artist/clown based in Hackney. They are a Soho Drag & Cabaret Lab alumni, and have performed at Margate Pride, AVM, Eek, The Plague and more. Zelda has been funded by Arts Council England and The Eaton Fund, and was a Metal Time & Space resident this year. Zelda is currently researching methods of making poetry for non-speaking disabled people.
DAY 3: COLOUR-POETIC FUTURES
FRIDAY 31 JULY 4PM TO 8PM
Come and PLAY a new Living Colour Imagination Game from COLOURWORXX. We will position colour as a key to colourful futures through Colour Chats, Palette Play and Spectrum Visions. Choose a combination of Pantone colour cards that expresses the future you’re dreaming into for yourself, your community and your planet. Add your colours to a growing collective palette, then write or draw why you made your choice.
Follow this up with Typewriter Poetry Exchange and tell them what’s on your hearts future – you can be as vague or specific as possible.
ARTIST 1: Colour Carver is an artist, colour facilitator, writer, producer and DJ from London. Cath works with colour, place, media and community. Weaving chromatic, civic, spatial, sonic, social, sensory and imaginal dimensions. Often through colour experiences, installations, participatory formats, film, radio, collaborative place projects, creative health sessions, storytelling and audio. Cath is the Founder of Colour Your City – an arts + research practice centred on colour and place, and COLOURWORXX – a colour adventure to elevate life; an evolving hybrid format, part media, colour club, publisher.
ARTIST 2: Mikayla Elias is a typewriter poet who travels to bring literature to others. They also are a music journalist, aspiring emo/post-hardcore historian, and vocalist in their own right. Mikayla started the typewriter poetry practice after publishing their first poetry collection bending toward the light in 2022. They earned a Master’s of Creative Writing at Queen Mary, University of London in 2024. Mikayla’s award-winning has been published in over 10 publications across the digital and physical world.
DAY 4: LOOMING THE VISION + IN-P055IBL3 MACH1N3
SATURDAY 01 AUGUST 4PM to 8PM
The Ecology Loom invites participants to offer ideas about their ecological vision for the future, weaving their responses into a large-scale collaborative loom that will bring together a paper ‘weaving’ of ecological ideas from local residents. Participants are invited to share their ideas and responses on strips of card that are woven into the loom, creating a paper weaving of a shared ecological vision for the future. Responses can vary widely from quickly-jotted ideas to poetry or drawing which when woven together will create a temporary collective artwork.
ARTIST 1: L.J. Furner makes work that interrogates sensory relationships to ecology, queerness and memory. Queer ecologies are at the heart of their practice – they explore modes of being in the world beyond the restrictions of human categorisation, working through these ideas by interweaving natural forms with human acts of ‘making’. Their work is largely mixed media, combining text-based, textile and photographic processes to create unusual means of documentation/archiving.
Artist 2: R.M. Sánchez-Camus Bio below
DAY 5: IN-P055IBL3 MACH1N3 + CLOSING RITUAL
SUNDAY 02 AUGUST 12PM TO 8PM
The year 2100. Against all expectations, humanity has achieved a state of homeostasis with the planet. The impossible has become possible. Somewhere between imagination and action, a machine was built that changed everything. The question is: how did we build it?
Visitors are invited to become its makers. Working with machine parts, drawings, written reflections and speculative ideas, participants contribute the mechanisms that make this extraordinary future possible. Every cog, circuit, lever and component represents a shift that must occur, whether technological, ecological, political, cultural or deeply personal.
ARTIST: R.M. Sánchez-Camus is a social futurist, artist, researcher whose work explores how collective imagination can shape more democratic, regenerative and equitable futures. Working across participatory art, civic leadership and creative research, they design experiences that bring people together to reimagine the systems that govern our lives, from local democracy, creative health, indigenous cosmology and our relationship with the more-than-human world.
Founder of Applied Live Art and co-founder of the Social Art Publications and Network, Marcelo believes the future is not something we wait for, but something we build together through imagination, participation and shared responsibility.
