Forest Futurism visits ancient forest ecosystems from the earth’s past, imagines future forests in the face of changing climate and considers the forest as a multi-species school, where children learn co-existence and more-than-human, non extractive ways of being.

Forest fossils not only provide a window into the distant past, allowing us to see what forests looked like millions of years ago and how trees have adapted to survive in challenging environmental conditions, including changing temperatures or drier conditions – but they can also give as an indication of how plants might react to the current changing climate. Similarly, looking at changes in the forest canopy can be a tool for understanding forest ecosystems and predicting how they will respond to future climate stresses. Working across film, photography, drawing, and sculpture from 3D scans of fossil, the project connects the paleontological deep time of tree fossils with future forest modeling to imagine more-than-human scenarios from the point of view of the forest. The main protagonists of the central film We have already lived through the future we just can’t rememeber it are children who move through the seasons in an intimate kinship with the forest, living and learning in tune with the silvestral environment and helping us imagine a different future based on more-than-human planetary co-existence.