Speculation is never just predictive. It doesn’t only account for the probability of certain futures, but it has the power to shape and reconfigure the material reality of the present. And while creativity is often delegated to the realm of speculative fiction, other, more insidious processes operate in the background, fully embracing this “creative” power to construct the future in real-time.

On the twentieth of April 2020, the price of oil went negative for the first time in history. The sudden event sent seismic shocks through the global economy. This oil-price shipwreck visualized how deeply entangled the present and the future are. It served as evidence of how the nature of raw materials can shift arbitrarily across the spectrum of resources and waste. The speculative video ‘Building Climate Futures’ investigates how to acknowledge the creative power of value in its dry economic sense, and link it to the creative power of art in imagining different potentials for the future.