On Friday 6th March, Tesni and Gaby (from CDE Bristol) took part in a gathering of over 80 artists at The Arc sober bar in Bristol, brought together by Rob Hopkins and Temwa, with support from Culture Declares Emergency.

The event called on Bristol’s vibrant arts scene – from street artists to festival organisers, crafters to clowns – to harness their creative skills and step into a future that people can fall in love with. 

Rob’s work is about giving people permission to fall in love with the future. A radical thing in a time of heaviness and hopelessness. For this, we need poetics, wild imaginings, feelings of profound connection… we need artists.

We (Tesni and Gaby) opened the session by sharing an invitation:

“Everyone in this room does incredible creative work.
What is your creative gift? Your medicine for your community?
How do you love a better world into being?
Some of us write songs that bring people to tears
Some of us hold epic parties that connect people to something higher
Some of us paint walls that bring our streets to life
Some of us are really good at growing beautiful gardens
At dancing wildly
At caring for our neighbours.”

We asked the artists present to write their gift down, in five words or less, alongside a sketch of their face.

We are working with textiles artist Bridget Ely to stitch these gifts into a sprawling community patchwork – with the vision of taking the patchwork on tour and continue to grow it, eternalising into fabric the collective power we hold as creatives. 

During the gathering, we time travelled into the future. Rob shared stories from 2036: rebel depaving movements that replace dull asphalt streets with shrubs and earth, bicycle lanes that weave their way across primary school roofs, and community energy co-ops that spring from residents tired of extractive energy monopolies. These were not imaginary futures, but real practices that are slipping through the tattered tears in the fabric of time into the present, in different neighbourhoods around the world.

We were invited to imagine our own future Bristols – where the delicate, nostalgic shimmer of birdsong and cricket call filled our ears, where schools were de-centralised and didn’t have walls, where people lay sleepily among the lush greenery in parks, summer sun on their faces. Where neighbourhoods were partnered to help each other out with resources, time, and skills.

Rob and his team are planning to bring their Time Machine to Bristol in November this year, to open a powerful time portal in the city. He brought a provocation to the culture builders of Bristol: while they are taking people on trips through the tear in the fabric of time, it’s quite possible to imagine that all sorts of unexpected things might come back through in the other direction, and start popping up around the town. What might they be? Street theatre? Street art? Flash mobs?

Following the event, Gaby, Tesni and a group of artists who met during the day have been getting together to begin imagining what we could create together. An engineer and machine builder, a puppeteer, a storyteller, a writer, an animator, a filmmaker, a facilitator of radical futures, with a desire to create opportunities for folk across Bristol to feel connection to place, to nature and community, and to a future they would want to be part of.

You can watch the livestream recording of Rob’s gathering here.

Latest news