📫Letter 12 — To Dr Louise Atkinson (with reply)

Imagination and participation in times of climate paralysis

Date: 22 October 2025
Recipient: Dr Louise Atkinson, Artist and Researcher — University of Leeds

Context

The third letter of Week 2 of One Letter a Day continues the dialogue with Leeds-based academics and artists whose work helps bridge knowledge, emotion and public engagement.
Dr Louise Atkinson’s socially engaged practice explores participation, place and creative collaboration. Through residencies, exhibitions and workshops, she invites communities to reinterpret the familiar and rediscover agency — offering an antidote to the paralysis that so often accompanies the climate conversation.

Letter

Dear Louise,

Thank you for agreeing to take part in One Letter a Day. It means a lot that you’re open to contributing to such a meaningful personal project.

Yesterday’s letter to Professor Milena Büchs circled around how societies might flourish within limits: how to design lives and institutions that sustain wellbeing as economic growth gives way to constraint. With you, I wanted to continue that thread on a different register — how we imagine such futures in the first place.

So much of public life feels suspended between anxiety and denial, anger becoming the outlet. When we talk about climate, it’s about targets and technologies, rarely about the kind of world we might actually want to inhabit together. Your practice feels like an antidote to that crisis of imagination. You create collaborative spaces where people reinterpret the familiar, rediscover agency, and co-author meaning.

In a time when climate change feels abstract or paralysing, could participatory art help communities re-imagine their surroundings as sites of renewal and possibility rather than decline? What would it take, in your view, for such creative work to move from participation to genuine co-creation — able to build hope into the fabric of everyday civic life? And if you were to set such a project in motion, what outcomes would you hope for, not only in artistic terms, but in how people might think or act differently afterward?

I ask because this project is also about restoring a shared capacity to imagine — something that can’t be planned or legislated, only invited.

Warmly,

– Vivien

📨 Reply from Dr Louise Atkinson

Received Friday, October 24th, 2025 at 13:07

Dear Vivien, 

Thank you for inviting me to be part of such an important and timely project. I’ve been following your letters and responses with interest and find that your reflections on imagination and action in the face of the climate emergency resonate strongly with the direction of my practice over the last few years, in particular the intersection of climate and social justice. 

For context, my recent project, If Walls Could Talk, developed in collaboration with Harewood House and the University of Leeds, invited members of Chinese-speaking communities in Leeds to respond to Chinese export wallpaper at Harewood through participatory art and augmented reality. This project invited participants to reimagine historical narratives and ecological relationships through everyday cultural practices. The resulting artwork addressed themes of seasonality, trade, and migration through food and has just received further seed funding from the Polycrisis Network at the university to explore these topics in more depth. 

In your letter you mention how we might rediscover agency, and this for me is one of the most crucial elements in the development of any type of collective imagining. We are presented with choices, but these often feel narrowly defined, or sometimes even coercive. To create spaces to imagine, people need to be able address the assumptions that shaped these initial options. 

In other words, what are the processes and institutions that are taken for granted and how were these historically constructed? How have circumstances become normalised to the extent that people can’t imagine otherwise? To move from participation to genuine co-creation therefore, requires a shift away from asking what people think in response to a specific question towards developing meaningful questions together. 

This brings its own challenges. As someone working in multilingual contexts and who enjoys learning other languages, the use of English as the primary mode of communication not only diminishes the capacity of participants who don't speak English fluently to fully engage with the co-creation process, but also limits the philosophical frameworks within which we are all able to imagine. 

The climate emergency as a global challenge then, needs to be imagined multilingually, not as a simple act of translation, but as a broader understanding of historical systems and worldviews and a way of acting together in a multicultural society. The good news is that we now have so many tools at our disposal to be able to make space for multilingual enquiry and my hope is that my practice goes some way towards enabling these spaces.

Best wishes

Louise

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Tomorrow’s letter continues Week 2 with Professor Suraje Dessai, exploring how climate adaptation research can help decision-makers act confidently amid uncertainty — and how that confidence might shape local resilience in Leeds.