Daniel Boris (Planting Solidarity Co.) presents ‘Ideas to Postpone the End of the World’ for the LINA Library 2025 curation.
Forecasting the future can be a crushing exercise. We’re easily overwhelmed by our own thoughts on what reality could look like in a couple of years or just a few months ahead. After all, the current times are ruled by flinching uncertainties: soaring inequalities, unpredictable climate, and geographic-political tensions, to name a few. The challenge of nourishing the future of society and its embedding ecologies is even more pressing when the consequences of our civilised, modern forms of living become evident in an extremely wide range of scenarios. Just look at Portugal, a country that has been experiencing drastic episodes of drought in the Alentejo and Algarve regions in recent decades, while paradoxically enduring the devastation of storms in the North and Central regions earlier in 2026.
Fertile Futures presented an enquiry into some of these unsettling questions by placing the Portuguese territory in a broad and continuous discussion on the scarcity, unpredictability and dispute of water. With curation conducted by the architect, professor and LINA fellow Andreia Garcia, the project encouraged a conceptual and pragmatic framework to rethink the role of architecture and design in supporting biodiverse, place-sensitive and regenerative plans for the watersheds. Envisioned as the response of the Representation of Portuguese Architecture to the “Laboratory of the Future”[11], Fertile Futures embraced the complexity of climate resilience by orchestrating the “Assembly of Thoughts”, a meeting ground for collective deliberation. These assemblies functioned as a space of convergence and divergence for different social, cultural and professional spheres to share their concerns and ideals and co-produce answers to the dilemmas between society and freshwater. The outcomes of the assemblies completed the seven architectural design proposals presented in the final exhibition at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. More recently, the projects, alongside the International Summer Seminar in Fundão, became part of the Fertile Futures’ second volume, a documentation detailing the entire process behind their laboratory.
Complementary to Fertile Futures attempts to reshape the spaces of discussion, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World offers a unique perspective of someone who has already gone through a climactic apocalypse. Compiling the thoughts and reflections of Ailton Krenak’s seminars in Portugal, the book settles an almost vis-à-vis dialogue about the experiences and perceptions of South American indigenous communities on the civilisatory crisis. The Brazilian activits narrates punctual episodes, such as the possibly irreparable damages caused by the extractivist corporations to the Rio Doce water basin and local biomes, to criticise the anthropocenic lens that separates humankind from nature. His arguments position water bodies, mountains and forests as living entities with voices of their own. Perhaps key figures to be considered, way more than metaphorically[22], in upcoming Assemblies of Thoughts or similar collaborative approaches. From my perspective, Krenak’s work, questioning the anthropocentric view, and Fertile Futures, challenging the limits of architecture and design, could be an interesting pairing, mutually colliding and matching into innovative discussions on desirable futures.
- The 18th International Exhibition of Architecture—La Biennale di Venezia 2023 general theme proposed by Lesley Lokko ↩︎
- Since the late 2000s, there have been cases of constitutional and legal rights being extended to ecological systems as a mechanism for protecting and planning the future of endangered species and habitats in countries such as Ecuador, India, Bolivia and New Zealand. ↩︎
