I was awarded a grant by Lewisham Borough of Culture to delve into young people’s response to the lockdown through the medium of comics and explore what comes next? What do the young people of Lewisham want their world to look like post covid? While so much of the media portrays a dystopic future - I want to challenge us to imagine instead a practical utopia, based on a radically hopeful vision of the future, one which throws into question the ideas of the old normal: how could we survive and thrive as the climate changes? What could a world based on mutual aid or without borders, without gender, without prisons look like? Comics are a classic medium for world building, from Marvel’s Wakanda to Miyozaki’s Nausicaä, and these questions are already swirling around us in the current moment, we will harness them into a moment of empowerment and creation.
Over the four sessions we will explore different types of world building through comics and zines and then we will collaboratively make our own. By the end of the sessions each participant will have made their own page(s) and I will edit them together into a zine which we will print and distribute not only to the participants on the programme but also leave in spaces all around the borough, to spread ideas about how youth are (re)claiming the future of Lewisham.