Poetry and Design fiction exploratory workshops - Tallinn April 2025

During our Culture Moves Europe stay in Tallinn, Miguel Pascual and I combined our respective disciplinary tools—literary creation and design fiction—to devise a multidisciplinary artistic process. 

 

In Tallinn, we tested our method through a workshop attended by a diverse audience of professionals and adult students from tech, business, education, research, and the arts. Tallinn lived up to its promise by introducing us to people with dual backgrounds—solid technical and digital expertise combined with a creative spirit open to artistic exploration.

Working with such a varied audience helped us reflect on how to refine our creative framework and give it theoretical, disciplinary, and even ethical consistency, without turning it into a rigid formula.
We were able to validate the relevance of our approach and feel encouraged to further propose artistic installations, conferences, and workshops at the intersection of poetry and design fiction, with the aim of exploring desirable and possible futures.

It was particularly rewarding to witness how positively people responded when invited to materialize their vision of a desired, sustainable future—offering alternatives to dominant narratives in public discourse.

 

Our approach was especially well received when materialized through poetic objects, particularly when showcased during the exhibition we organized at the end of our stay.

 

This exhibition, held in the main hall of Tallinn University, included preparatory texts, poetic prototypes, poems, and sound pieces. In conversation with visitors, we presented our approach: exploring possible futures through poetry (provoking emotions with inventive language) and design artefacts (materializing unseen or unthought realities).