The Chair of Digital Cultures is excited to announce that Water Sovereignties - the first of three installments of the online exhibition Reclaiming Futures - has just been launched. It is now live on againstcatastrophe.net.

Reclaiming Futures: Water Sovereignties features artworks by Solveig Qu Suess and Antonia Hernández, which explore struggles over the future of water in the Mekong Delta and the Petorca Valley in Chile. The accompanying essays by Andrew Alan Johnson, Jerome Whitington, Michael Pryke, and Meera Karunananthan and Marcela Olivera expand upon the conversations and questions raised by Suess’s and Hernández’s creative projects.

Stay tuned for the next two installments of Reclaiming Futures, which will be coming to the Against Catastrophe website soon! Reclaiming Futures showcases seven works by creative practitioners from around the world, commissioned by the Against Catastrophe project. The commissioned works critically examine how design, architecture, and technology are implicated in producing catastrophic eco-social realities, but also offer tools for imagining and building more equitable, democratic, and sustainable futures. Commissioned practitioners include Solveig Qu Suess, Antonia Hernández, Dele Adeyemo, Michaela Büsse, Paulo Tavares with autonoma (Paula Marujo & Laura Pappalardo), Bahar Noorizadeh, and Yelta Köm and Agit Özdemir from the collective Arazi Assembly. Following an open call for project proposals, the selected works were developed in conversation with the curators and fellow commissioned practitioners.

Reclaiming Futures is co-commissioned and co-curated by Nadia Christidi and Özgün Eylül Iscen. The online exhibition's design and illustrations are by Tal Halpern. Led by Orit Halpern, the Against Catastrophe project is part of Governing through Design, a collaborative research initiative supported by a Sinergia Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. This project is also supported by funds from TUDISC.