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Planetary Imaginaries by Liam Young

Planetary Imaginaries by Liam Young
Southern California Institute of Architecture
960 E 3rd Street
Los Angeles, California 90013
Sunday, March 8, 2026 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Free

Our relationship to the future has forever been filtered through the delirium of our imagined worlds. For centuries, we have fled into fictions to wrestle with the unbearable questions of our own making. Now, at the edge of catastrophe, when the very idea of a future trembles, our generation is called to the quiet, defiant labor of hope, to find light when the world grows dark. Created by director and worldbuilder Liam Young and expanded through collaborations with acclaimed science fiction authors drawn from across the globe, Planetary Imaginaries presents a chorus of stories that sprawl from the microscopic to the planetary. Across films and fragments, movie miniatures and ceremonial costumes, action figures and speculative architectures, the exhibition maps a constellation of fictional worlds, visions of wonderous resistance and new mythologies for an Earth remade.

Encounter stories of infrastructures that resemble mountains and oceans, where computation becomes cathedral, where islands bloom atop the drowned spires of oil rigs turned to coral, where megacities fold inward to make room for planetary parks, and indigenous rockets rise from the rusting lungs of gas fields, where a spacecraft, our last emissary, drifts into the deep silence between stars. Stories weathered by the sobering knowledge that our hopeful futures are written in the geology of a once wounded earth. Here, within these Planetary Imaginaries, we are called to dream again, to invent new worlds that are a testimony to our boundless desires and our fragile chance to begin.

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