![Two hinged plywood boxes lying open on a pale blue surface, holding decks of printed cards marked "Organisers" and "Locals", with a title card reading [UN]COMMON THREADS.](https://withnessing.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/uncommon-threads.webp)
This workshop invites you to speculate on alternative futures through collaborative storytelling. Employing illustrated cards depicting diverse agents—creatures, objects, phenomena, and materials—you will weave narratives that explore a speculative future framework defined in relation to the specific thematic context of each workshop iteration. While the cards act as mediums of imagination, they also serve as metaphors or key elements within the realities you construct. Hopefully, they will inspire you to uncover unexpected relations, overlooked tensions, and hidden possibilities—and to reimagine a more-than-human matrix beyond the human-centric constraints of the present.
Through this process, the workshop engages with the discourse on decolonising the imaginative dimension of the future from systems created by those in power—systems that have long dictated what is deemed plausible. Instead, it cultivates a shared resource of (un)common perspectives, where multiple worldviews are respected, reimagined, and remembered.
Given its flexibility to adapt to diverse thematic contexts, the project will gather a range of perspectives into a growing archive of imagined futures. As part of a larger, ongoing initiative, each new iteration acts as a distinct yet interconnected case study, bringing in different voices and gradually building a network of storytellers who collectively rethink possible ways of coexistence.
How it works
Participants are divided into groups, each drawing a blind card that assigns a stakeholder role within a context-specific speculative framework. Each group then receives a pack of illustrated cards representing creatures, objects, phenomena and materials—one of which is blank, and can be used to propose a new element that will be illustrated and integrated into future sessions. Groups select three cards as the key facets of their narrative and craft a speculative story in any form they choose: a tale, a fable, a poem, an interview, a diary entry, a manifesto, a news report, a letter. Completed stories are marked SPECULATED with a stamp and signed by all contributors.
Activations
The chapters of this enquiry, in the order they happened.
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Workshop
Forecast Festival 2045
Radialsystem · Berlin, Germany
The first activation of [UN]COMMON THREADS, held at Forecast Festival 9, asking participants to speculate on the future of the art festival itself from four stakeholder positions.
![Four printed briefs laid out on a dark green table, each holding a folded deck of [UN]COMMON THREADS cards marked with a coloured stakeholder disc—Organisers, Creatives, Locals and Audiences—with four patterned blank cards below.](https://withnessing.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/forecast-festival-2045.webp)
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Workshop
Writing-Reading Laboratory 2045
Xaraxura Press · Tbilisi, Georgia
An iteration of [UN]COMMON THREADS held with Xaraxura Press, asking participants to write from within a 2045 in which a pervasive instability known as The Trembling has become a central condition of life.
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Workshop
Reclaiming Imagination of the City
Design Institute · Tbilisi, Georgia
An iteration of [UN]COMMON THREADS on the future of Tbilisi, in which participants wrote as local communities, heritage professionals, planners and developers, or the city’s nonhuman citizens.
![A participant writing in Georgian on a printed [UN]COMMON THREADS worksheet.](https://withnessing.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/reclaiming-imagination-workshop.webp)
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Exhibition
EZOLOGIA — Porous Body of Tbilisi
Karvasla — Tbilisi History Museum · Tbilisi, Georgia
An exhibition asking how the typology of the Tbilisian Courtyard shapes the city’s urban fabric—analytical maps, archival documents, photo essays and film, alongside our installation on reclaiming the imagination of the city.
