Interview with Guided by Nature

At the end of May 2025, Guided by Nature will open the doors to their immersive exhibition — an experience designed to inform and inspire a broad audience about the effects of the climate crisis. The exhibition is part of the “Gestaltade klimatframtider” project, which we’re proud to support. We had the chance to sit down with Guided by Nature to hear more about the work they’re doing within the project.

– We hope the exhibition experience, combined with meetings and conversations with researchers and guides, will create a heightened sense of the importance and possibility of engaging in the effort to create a better future through multisensory and emotional experiences.

You have been receiving support from The Swedish Postcode Lottery Foundation for your project “Gestaltade klimatframtider.” Can you please tell us more about your intentions and what you hope to achieve with this initiative?

It is fantastic that we have received support from The Swedish Postcode Lottery Foundation for this research-based interactive exhibition and communication project about our shared climate futures. The exhibition is inspired by the UN’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), presenting not just one, but multiple possible futures. Each describes societal development based on various parameters such as carbon emissions, energy use, economic development, education, population growth, and technological means to extract carbon from the atmosphere. It challenges the notion that climate change is beyond our control, suggesting that “the greenhouse gas genie is out of the bottle” and that we must actively co-create our climate futures.

Different artistic interpretations inspire the exhibition in the form of greenhouses that visitors can walk through, placed in gardens and parks. These broken greenhouses are the basis for an experience-based exhibition designed to sweep up the fragments and attempt to create an alternative crystal ball using artistic installations to build participatory dialogue. For example:

• SSP3 (“A Rocky Road”): Visitors walk through bead-curtain data models of the Arctic warming at triple global rates.
• SSP4 (“A Road Divided”): The visitor must find physical balance on broken terrain, symbolic of social and climate inequality.

We will also host science festivals, inviting the public to build dialogue with people from various disciplines. There will be interactive school visits, an art school for the youngest participants, and the opportunity for everyone to write letters and messages to their future selves.

With this project, we hope to engage a wide range of people in discussions about the future and instil hope and concern—but above all, to spark curiosity and commitment. We are convinced that the future is a sketch and that we all have a chance to influence its shape and colour.

In this project, artists and scientists at several universities in Sweden collaborate. How can research and art collaborate to engage a broad general public in the work of limiting climate change?

We all have long experience working against climate change in our respective networks and contexts, but to reach a broader audience, including those who don’t actively seek out our respective arenas, we believe that co-creation and dialogue can open up new points of contact.

This project is an experiment in that direction, where we challenge ourselves and the audience to meet in a somewhat different format. The project creates “dialogue-building walks” with researchers, artists, and visitors in small groups as an alternative to the art world’s white cube and the academic lecture hall. These are meant to “spark discussions and reflections” on different climate futures. Walk leaders are encouraged to build dialogue around topics that motivate them, including critiques of IPCC models or alternatives like degrowth and climate justice.

Can you tell us more about your upcoming exhibition in Lund’s botanical garden in May 2025?

The Broken Greenhouse / Embodied Climate Futures exhibition opens on May 24 at the Botanical Garden in Lund. It will be open for a weekend of guided walks to start conversations about our possible climate futures, especially how people can create those futures, and public activities.

Visitors can take a sound walk, enjoy their packed picnic on specially designed blankets, post messages on a “message board from the future,” and be lulled to rest in a group of “weather hammocks,” among other activities. The five different greenhouse sculptures are placed throughout the garden, and it takes about an hour to walk through the entire exhibition. Along the way, visitors experience everything from a rotating circular greenhouse home to a dystopian greenhouse shaped like a brown bunker.

What do you hope this project will contribute to?

We hope the exhibition experience, combined with meetings and conversations with researchers and guides, will create a heightened sense of the importance and possibility of engaging in the effort to create a better future through multisensory and emotional experiences.

The main ambition is to spread knowledge about the science behind SSPs so that people, after visiting the exhibition, understand what these scenarios mean. However, the unique format of the exhibition will also likely create a lasting memory to return to.

This can happen on different levels—from making small changes in daily habits (like how one eats or uses energy) to greater involvement in organizations working to fight climate change.

And we hope many will take the chance to post a letter to their future selves, which will be collected in a seed/time capsule. Letters written by visitors will be stored in a time capsule to be reactivated in 2050 and 2100, reinforcing intergenerational responsibility and long-term reflection.

Photos: Jean Baptiste Beranger

– Greenhouses have a long history of manipulating and imitating the climate for gain. The fact that the greenhouses of the future could be the last habitable places, protected from extreme weather, can therefore seem like the irony of fate (…) botanical gardens and greenhouses are also places to germinate seeds of thought, and we hope that the exhibition Broken Greenhouse – Embodied Climate Futures will act as an inspiring platform for discussions on how we can shape our common future together, says Bigert & Bergström 

– Climate change is not a planetary driver of biodiversity loss but a consequence of how we use the planet. Therefore, dealing with biodiversity, climate change, and sustainability issues requires reflecting on how we live on our planet. Facing these problems is time-limited, as future climate impacts will accumulate and eventually threaten biodiversity, thus limiting our options for the future. Humans have always had a great capacity for change, often quite rapidly. The capacity for adaptation and storytelling is intrinsic. Whatever future climate we create will be our choice, says Keith Larson, PhD, Ecologist and Director of the Arctic Centre at Umeå University