Creative Climate Futures Collaboration

by Barbara Lepani | Mar 26, 2026 | Our Collective

Creative Climate Futures Incubator

The Aust-Indo Creative Climate Futures Incubator is a cross-cultural artist incubation-residency and exhibition program that brings together Indonesian and Australian artists to imagine alternative climate futures through community driven practices. We take a climate justice lens to this project, recognising the sharply differentiated climate impacts and responsibilities across the region, especially for Indigenous coastal and youth.

This 2026 program brings together 2–4 Australian artists with 4–8 Indonesian artists for an intensive hybrid program combining online exchange, in-person incubation in Yogyakarta, and public programs including exhibitions and workshops.

Over several months, selected artists engage in hybrid residencies—combining workshops with scientists and cultural practitioners, immersive research in local communities (such as coastal, rural, and Indigenous groups), and collaborative prototyping of new artworks. By situating art-making at the intersection of speculation and lived experience, the program fosters dialogue on resilience, adaptation, and shared ecological imaginaries across the region. We will actively involve both human and more-than-human collaborators.

The program culminates in a bi-national exhibitions and public programs presented in both Indonesia and Australia, complemented by a digital platform that archives artworks, narratives, and participatory processes. Featuring installations, media works, speculative design, and performance, these exhibitions and programs serve as both an artistic exploration and public forums, amplifying community voices and expanding climate discourse beyond traditional art and environmental spaces. This initiative positions art as a vital tool for envisioning plural, collective futures shaped by ecological interdependence. The project will be guided by an ecological-ethical framework covering sustainability, ethics, technological engagement.

Artists will be encouraged to create small practical interventions such as simple ecological tools, micro-composting, seed libraries, or local climate futures maps, ensuring artworks have the potential to support genuine community resilience rather than limiting ideas to the public programs.

It is an experimental co-designed initiative of the CFI collective, an Aust-Indo artist collective. Rather than presenting catastrophic visions of climate collapse, the Climate Futures Incubator invites artists to explore resilient, speculative, and collectively shaped futures through community-engaged practice. The program positions artistic practice as a vital tool for envisioning diverse healthy climate futures shaped by ecological interdependence.

Invitation

Dr Michael Chew and Gav Barbey are seeking artists/creatives to participate in the Climate Futures Incubator – an Australia–Indonesia collaborative program that brings together Australian artists with Indonesian artists for a climate arts development program in Yogyakarta during July-Aug, including public exhibitions and workshops online. The project is being organised through CFI and HONF collective.

Dr Michael Chew, Project Coordinator and Australia core team artist is a freelance community artist and social ecologist whose practice led work explores creative, participatory processes in social and environmental contexts, with a focus on storytelling across cultural and geographic borders. He draws from interdisciplinary perspectives with degrees in Participatory Design, Mathematical Physics, Critical Theory, Art Photography and Social Ecology, and has run community storytelling projects across the Asia-Pacific region. His design-based action-research PhD explored how participatory photography and other creative practices can inspire youth environmental behaviour change across cities in Bangladesh, China and Australia, and he recently completed a Rotary Peace Fellowship at Chulalongkorn University investigating distributed co design processes with youth and environmental storytelling.

Gav Barbey, Australia core team artist is a Daylesford-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on participatory and immersive movement, mark-making, and dimensional space exploration. With over 30 years of experience, Gav works across multiple disciplines, including visual arts, theatre, and film. He holds a degree in theatre and film studies from the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA), specialising in production, set, and costume design. Gav has collaborated with numerous theatre and dance companies and was a founding member of Richard Roxburgh’s ‘Burning House.’ His recent work emphasizes co-creation with the public, including projects at Hyphen Regional Gallery and ephemeral sculptures in Penang and Kuala Lumpur. Gav also works within the corporate and education sectors as a nature-play facilitator, human-centered designer, ideation facilitator, and community engagement expert. Over the past five years, somatic movement has become central to his practice, with daily dance explorations during COVID serving as a transformative element of his studio work. As a yoga and somatic educator with expertise in Body Mind Centering (BMC), Gav’s interests lie in the organic flow and symmetry of patterns. He is currently on the board and curatorial team for Radical Fields, an immersive arts festival.

Gav’s extensive experience in participatory arts and somatic movement contribute expertise to the project’s experimental engagement models. His focus on co creation enhances accessibility protocols through multi-sensory design.

To find out more about Gav Barbey films, video pieces (Iceworks), animations
www.gavbarbey.com
https://vimeo.com/gavbarbey/videos

Incubator Program Foci

The incubator supports interdisciplinary creative experimentation and collaborations in the following foci:

Speculative Climate Futures– Creative experimentation imagining alternative responses to climate change through artistic and research-based practices

Community-Engaged Practice– Participatory approaches involving local communities, collective learning, and shared storytelling related to ecological knowledge and climate experiences

Hybrid Digital and Tactile Methodologies– Combining digital tools (interactive media, digital archives, environmental sensing, augmented reality) with material practices (craft traditions, biomaterials, ecological processes)

Ecological Knowledge Integration– Engaging Indigenous and local ecological knowledge as living cultural practices informing environmental awareness and climate action
Interdisciplinary Collaboration– Encouraging collaboration between artists, designers, scientists, technologists, and community practitioners across diverse fields.

Curatorial Framework: Dark Garden

The incubator is guided by the Dark Garden curatorial framework, which reimagines the garden as a relational, planetary space where humans, more-than-humans, technologies, and environments interact—a shared laboratory for experimentation, co-creation, and future-oriented thinking. The Dark Garden framework takes inspiration from ecological and participatory thinking, including dark, deep and political ecology, multispecies thinking, and relational art theories, alongside non-Western cultural knowledge and approaches.

Three Conceptual Themes

Your project should engage with one of the following themes:

Inter-Species Relations—Multispecies relations, environmental sensing, and communication between humans and nonhuman systems.

Geographic Imaginaries—Climate migration, environmental displacement, and spatial narratives connecting Indonesia and Australia.

Climate Justice—Indigenous knowledge, environmental sovereignty, disaster politics, and ecological responsibility.

Three Elemental Layers

Your work should explore one of these elemental layers:

Water—Fluid systems, hydrological cycles, oceans, rivers, coastal environments, and ecological transformation, lakes and urban waterways. Projects may investigate water ecologies, climate impacts, biological processes, or speculative water futures.

Earth—Materiality, land relations, geological materials, landscapes, forests, and ecological knowledge. Artists may work with soil, plants, biomaterials, natural pigments, mycelium, batik, or other material practices to explore environmental resilience, landscape transformation, and planetary relationships.

Air—Atmosphere, invisible systems, sound environments, wind and planetary circulation, air and sky, climate processes. Projects may address air quality, atmospheric sensing, or speculative atmospheric futures.