Solar ~ renewable energy, the power of nature
punk ~ against the current dominant culture
Solarpunk is a science-fiction genre where low- and high- tech solutions are combined to live a good life together. It foresees an end to our climate crisis while building an equal society. Solarpunk is not about growing the economy but about growing our community and growing ourselves. A genre of eco-social utopian stories and art.
Most science-fiction explores life during or after an apocalypse, while solarpunk explores what life could be like when we fix everything. Imagine we sucessfully had a green revolution and we made the world a fair and equal place.
It is the miracle question “What if tonight a miracle happened and you woke up in your ideal life?” on a societal scale.
The visual style of solarpunk often has many dynamic natural swirls reminiscent of the Arts and Crafts movement or Art Nouveau and Ghibliesque watercolours with a lot of vibrant blues and greens.
There is a growing body of stories and art that take place in this imaginary future and the more solarpunk we make, the more we solidify the dream.
SOLARPUNK WORKSHOP
I think it is important that we spend some time in a utopian future like solarpunk. We have filled our media and our minds with dystopian stories and these shape our expectancies of what a future reality could possibly be. Now there is a growing body of positive stories and different reality building. To promote and support expectancies of a positive future, I organise creative solarpunk workshops.
During the workshop we will explore principles and examples of solarpunk. We will use Episodic Future Thinking (see Imaginable) to do mental time travelling and come back to create snippets of our own solarpunk future in stories, drawings, games, paintings or collage.
Solarpunk workshops are a 1 or 4 hour practice in positive future thinking. A meditative experience of your own imagination.
Solarpunk workshops can be open to everyone with enough material to suit all levels of creativity. We can also shape a workshop around a particular theme/question or a specific material to create snippets with.
If you are interested in a solarpunk workshop please get in touch.
EARLIER SOLARPUNK WORKSHOPS
Solarpunk de Buurt in OBA De Hallen, Amsterdam snippets woorden in de leeshoek
Solarpunk de Buurt workshop in Kas Keerweer posters
Solarpunk workshop for XR Regenerative Circle
My solarpunk article in Elektor in English Nederlands French
Solarpunk art workshop at Landjuweel festival 2023
All images on this page are made by me with DALLE2 and are free to use
MORE SOLARPUNK
Short solarpunk stories van XR Wordsmiths ENG
Solarpunk art collection Andrewism 2023 Bioregions
A Solarpunk Manifesto: Turning Imaginary into Reality essay
The Weight of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures book