Fictional Workshops Against Despair

If we could prove that the reality we live in is always a creation of our imagination—and we perceive it as if it were fiction—then we’d have to admit that our perception is guided by imagination, and vice versa.

Then, how do we imagine the future when reality seems to shut every door? What if we could think together, from the everyday, about scenarios that help us live better?

Workshop-Fictions Against Despair is a mediation and speculative design project that creates collective spaces to imagine futures where Buen Vivir is possible. It emerges as a situated practice in response to the widespread feeling of collapse and despair, proposing that imagination is the first step toward change.

We work with people from different regions to share fears, desires, and questions. Through role-playing, drawing, conversation, and critical reflection, we create a constellation of visual stories—not to build perfect prototypes, but to illuminate paths, challenge dominant narratives, and hold space for shared questions.

Speculative design, away from market-driven innovation and extractive logics, gives us space to think freely. Instead of solving problems, it raises questions. Instead of offering fixed solutions, it opens up many possibilities:

• What if we could create spaces that more often prioritize our everyday needs?
• What would those places look like? What dynamics, objects, technologies, or relationships would support them?
• How would these practices reshape us?

It is often said that today «it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.» Inspired by Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse, this proposal seeks to challenge that premise. The goal is to use speculative design to sustain post-capitalist imaginaries and project futures where Buen Vivir—rather than collapse—is placed at the center.

This project navigates between living archive, magical realism, and eco-fiction, integrating tender technologies, interspecies bonds, and collective memory. It does not seek immediate solutions, but rather to rehearse forms of situated autonomy.

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