Friday 6th March 2026 Bristol’s Street Artists (Venue & time TBC, 2 hours max)
Book your free ticket HERE
The Bristol Artist Community are invited to come together, to be inspired by the inspirational Rob Hopkins, who will take us on a journey into the future.
A climate scientist will give a 10 minute presentation on the current situation regarding the climate emergency, along with stating that it is still entirely possible to keep global temperatures between 1.5 and 2% and the steps that humanity needs to take.
Jo Hook (Temwa UK MD & Co-Founder) will give a 3-4 minute presentation on the impact of climate change in Malawi, the countries that are responsible for excess carbon emissions and the impacts of the countries most impacted.
Then Rob Hopkins will give a 60 minute presentation explaining the possibilities of the future that he has seen, how bringing the change needed on the scale needed is possible and artists can help bring this change. Rob will share stories of what a new kind of activism that enables the future to enter into people looks like. The talk will be live streamed and recorded.
There will be time for Q&A discussions at the end.
Three years ago, Rob Hopkins saw a tshirt slogan that changed his life. Worn by a young woman at a Black Lives Matter protest it read ‘I’ve Been to the Future. We Won’. As someone who had spent many years seeking bottom-up responses to the climate and ecological emergency, it shifted his thinking about how to inspire change. Perhaps, rather than foregrounding collapse and the risk of extinction, we might do better instead to focus on the future we could yet create if we were to do everything we know we need to do, but do it in a way that hugely improves peoples’ lives?
What if the principal purpose of movements for positive change became the cultivation of longing for that future? This sparked a deep and rich exploration of these ideas, captured in his latest book (launched in June 2025) book ‘How to Fall in Love with the Future: a time traveller’s guide to changing the world’ and in the accompanying album and touring immersive live show ‘Field Recordings from the Future’
Who, he asks, are the people in our culture who are best at cultivating longing? They’re generally not climate scientists or climate activists. Rather they are poets, street artists, storytellers, scriptwriters, business marketing execs, video game designers. Without them, without their skills, there’s no way we can realise the words of novelist Don Delillo that “longing, on a large scale, is what makes history”.
This event takes the form of an invitation. If we were to mobilise the collective ability to cultivate longing that is present in the room, with a sense of urgency alongside a huge sense of possibility, what could we create? How can we become more playful with time, better at drawing the future we long for into the present and making it real for people? It’s a conversation that needs you to be part of it.
Sign up for your free ticket here.