This article explores the complex impact of climate change on the way coastal futures are imagined, using the example of the first UK coastal community singled out for managed retreat. Drawing on site-specific, lens-based artistic research, Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism is employed to understand how the future comes to matter on a shifting shoreline. The village of Fairbourne, on the west coast of Wales, was selected for this research as it was surrounded by predictions regarding the effects of sea level rise, as well as abounding in stories and ancient legends. Over the last decade the foretelling of the future of this site was constructed and told through a synthesis of scientific knowledge, media coverage, council communication and individual imagination. The article employs insights from new materialist theories and more specifically Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism in order to understand how the material and the discursive co-produce each other, asserting the need for a better understanding of how the discursive affects the material. By collapsing traditional notions of time and space as fixed, distinct categories, this framework reveals how climate futures are actively shaped through different intra-actions on the current shoreline, revealing the future as open and pointing to how we can become responsive to the relations we inhabit. The research highlights connections between imagination, climate change and responsibility that entail a sense of possibility rather than obligation.
Claire Waffel (Sun,) studied this question.