27.8. - 5.9.2026
Exhibition Opening: Thursday 27.8.26
Cigarettenfabrik
Sihlquai 268, 8005 Zürich
echoes of drought
IMAGINING FUTURES BETWEEN SPECULATIVE DESIGN AND HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
Echoes of Drought explores the ripple effects of megadroughts in the Swiss Alps—the water towers of Europe—and their repercussions across ecological, geopolitical, and socio-economic dimensions. The project imagines possible futures through a hybrid approach that brings together high-performance climate modeling, eco-hydrological simulations, and speculative design.
Combining high-resolution climate data with world-building and storytelling, Echoes of Drought produces visual future narratives that map the complexities of ecological entanglements in a more-than-human world. The project unfolds spatially through an immersive exhibition and four-channel video installation, following four rivers from their alpine sources to the seas.
Along these trajectories, the work traces cascading effects of drought on water bodies, species webs and human systems— from river transportation to shifts in predator–prey dynamics, from disrupted energy and food networks to changing cultural relationships with landscape and place.
Speculating about possible futures and visualizing how impacts transcend systems and scales propagating through space and time, the project makes visible the interdependencies that sustain life across hydrological networks and foregrounds the politics of water in navigating Europe’s future.
Images (c) Sophie Falkeis