Welcome to the Craftocene
Stories about the future of humanity
The Craftocene came to us during the pandemic, while we were building Refuge for Resurgence (2020). Inspired by 5 years of working on Mitigation of Shock (2015-2020), in 2018 I had started writing and speaking about more-than-human centred design, first at the Interaction Design Festival ,and then most significantly at Tentacular Festival, about more-than-human politics, foregrounding a more-than-human position across planetary scale thinking - from fixing to caring, from planning to gardening, from independence to interdependence.
In the chaos of 2020, when so much of what we’d taken for granted was stripped away, we found ourselves drawn back to the most fundamental things: making with our hands, caring for each other and for the materials we had, asking who gets a seat at the table and what it means to set that table with love. Refuge for Resurgence was where that thinking first took physical form.
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There are many ‘ocenes’ now, each one an attempt to name the era we are in and what matters most about it. The Anthropocene is useful because it names the impact we have had, and Capitalocene because it names the cause. But we wanted a word that named a practice, something you can actually shape with your hands, heart and spirit, a way of working through the mess we’re in. Crafting materials, stories and myths matters to us because it is slow, deliberate and opens new possibilities. When you pick up a discarded vape battery and rework it into a power source, you are not just making something useful. You are reversing the grand narrative we have been told; the logic of an entire system: the supply chain, the planned obsolescence, the assumption that your role as a person is to consume and discard. You are paying attention to a material that was designed to be invisible after use.
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The Craftocene lands at a moment when the outside world is accelerating in a tragic direction. Beneath the stuff we consume, the systems we rely on, and the stories we tell, the myths that hold us are becoming undone, the systems that underwrote the myth of infinite growth are themselves showing their limits. A dangerously fertile space, that we struggle to make sense of, even as this change ripples around and among us. In this space, we propose a spirit-first approach of embodied attention, the beginning of a different relationship with the world. That intentionality, care and material dialogue become the foundation of, perhaps, more hopeful futures.
Over the past six years or so, we’ve explored this idea through a series of works, each one pulling at a different thread of the same question: what kind of world can we build from the wreckage of this one? What kind of ancestors are we becoming in the process?
Then Claudia Banz, who we’d first spoken with when she was Curator for Design at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin, took on a new role as Director of the Weltmuseum in Vienna, and the conversation picked up again in the summer of 2025. This time, the dialogue moved toward a different scale and ambition. We began to think about an interconnected story arc that could hold the full trajectory of our research. What if we showed The Craftocene not as a collection of projects, but as a proposition for civilisational transition?
And so, in record time, we have the biggest solo our studio has ever produced. The Craftocene brings together three works: Refuge for Resurgence, Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream, and a brand-new commission, Relics of Abundance, across three stunning rooms at the Weltmuseum. It opened on 2nd March and runs until 16 August 2026.
Back to the summer of 2025: Jon and I began to explore what we call wide spectrum entanglements: the threads that connect a single discarded vape battery to the lithium mines, a sneaker to high frequency trading, a designer chair to the founding myths of modernism.
Jon had been researching cargo cults for a long while, the Melanesian movements that arose in response to colonial occupation, particularly after the airdrop of manufactured goods during the Second World War. The term itself was conceived through a colonial lens, bundling together a whole range of practices, and it’s rightly controversial. But there was something underneath the colonial framing that we kept returning to. When manufactured goods appeared and upended old ways of living, communities remade these glimpsed objects from what materials were left. They performed ceremonies. They ritualised what they’d observed. They were trying to make sense of a system whose logic was invisible to them.
Anthropologists and ethnographers used to talk about cargo cults as though they were a curious phenomenon that happened with other people on a remote island far away from us. But circling through these ideas and reflecting on The Craftocene, what became evident was the uncomfortable recognition that we are in fact here today consumed by the cargo cult of capitalism.
However “civilised” we think of ourselves, we haven’t transcended object-based magical thinking. We think we live in the age of reason, yet our entire culture is organised around the veneration of things: sneakers conserved in clingwrap like holy relics, open-plan living rooms that look more like halls of worship than homes, a 136 million dollar Manhattan condo that is barely visited, let alone lived in, just a unit, a price, liquidity. We imbue stuff with supernatural powers: we pay thousands of pounds for a handbag that costs less than a hundred to make because it is perceived to bestow some value or power upon us. Money itself feels like a collective hallucination. If you told an anthropologist you’d discovered a civilisation that did this, they might not hesitate to call our obsessions ‘ritual behaviour’.
Jon was intrigued by the repeated appearance of modernist design chairs in these spaces: the Wassily, the LC2, the Eames, and the values and aspirations they carry, the haunted nostalgia for a time when the future looked new and full of possibilities. These chairs were supposed to herald a utopian era where mass production would deliver us from hardship. They carried in their lines an excitement for new materials and a faith in rational progress. But as Jon dug into the history, into Adolf Loos and the founding myths of modernism, we kept running into the same ideas of social Darwinism that once obscured anthropologists’ understanding of cargo cults.
I was drawn to the sneaker, to the sheer cultural obsession with it, everybody’s devotion to the shoe. And to the smartphone, that glowing abyss. Because what interested us wasn’t just the objects in isolation but what they reveal about the belief system underneath. If we do reckon with the consequences of modernism’s “optimistic” vision, the ever-growing mountains of waste, we can see how the story flips. The same culture that promised liberation through objects becomes a culture addicted to overproduction.
If the rituals of cargo cults look absurd to modern onlookers, how might the material remains of our relentless production come across to someone looking in from the outside? What would our descendants think we worshipped, or feared, if they found the remnants of all this? To those unfamiliar with the gravitas of asset speculation, debt overhang, or quantitative easing, the demands of the Market for exponential growth might loom like a divine authority. What rituals do we perform, in the hopes that prosperity will follow, as we place our faith in the system even after it has proven incapable of solving its own foundational flaws?
And so, we began to craft a speculative archaeology of our cargo cult economics. Relics of Abundance, the new work at the heart of The Craftocene, imagines a civilisation after ours (and by ‘ours’ we mean the orthogonal axis of rampant consumption that cuts through certain geographics and cultures; rather than a singular monolithic identity to describe the ‘whole world’ which is flawed in so many ways) sifting through the remnants and detritus of our excess, trying to piece together something like a Wassily chair to summon the old gods of abundance. We imagine, in our story, that they might work from fragments, perhaps surviving print media, distorted stories, and physical waste. Their understanding of our time is profoundly incomplete. They look back at our era as a mythical “time of plenty.” And their reverent misremembering is making visible what is already true, and slightly absurd, about our present: that we built our identity around the worship of things, and called it rationality. The distance of a far future just makes it easier to see.
What followed this research, then, was the intense mayhem of making that overtakes the studio during such a project. Across workshops, backyards, nooks and corners, the studio turned itself over to foraging, salvaging, crafting. Foraged cans, Coca Cola, beer, fizzy drinks, bags and bags of them, were burned in a clay contraption in the garden in the depths of winter, flattened and clad painstakingly onto a delicately HANDCRAFTED (!!!) wooden frame that our colleague Ed Lewis made over several weeks, to form the metal skin of the Wassily chair.
Long days working with black obsidian, polishing it, working melted silver into a band to frame the rock, it began to resemble a smartphone. Baking clay beads, pressing buttons extracted from foraged remote controls into the clay that then became the rosary. Molten lead poured into a mould for the sneaker exploded on more than one occasion, masks on, safety measures very much in place. And all of this in the wettest winter we’ve had, the marquee blowing away just as concrete was poured for the TV. Care, rigour, but also quite literally sweat and tears went into the making.
In a dimly lit room in the Weltmuseum, the final objects are displayed as complete ritual scenes, each one representing a ceremony performed in devotion to the Market. They carry an eerie sense of familiarity, grouped on plinths according to their respective rituals, and labelled meticulously. We wanted to use the aesthetic language of the museum itself, to show how future archaeologists might make sense of our material obsessions.
What appears to be a skeleton of the iconic Wassily chair wrapped in blue ribbon is, the gallery text informs us, in fact a ceremonial seat for a coming-of-age practice, its detail long since forgotten. The lead shoe, laid next to an ornate wooden box, is recast yearly as a sacrifice to planned obsolescence. A rosary hung on its bespoke display fixture, with buttons of a remote control embedded in the delicate clay, belongs next to a TV made of concrete, a shrine used in a meditation practice to receive messages from the aforementioned God, Market. The clay lamp next to the Wassily chair burns to mark the passing of time for those who would gaze into the abyss of the obsidian smartphone. On the walls, poetic fragments like lost scriptures tell the story of a civilisation steeped in magical thinking.
And threading through the room, barely there, a soundscape by James Bulley, poignant yet disturbing. The poems recited in cautious voices, as if to preserve the sanctity of the Market’s worship.
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Of course, The Craftocene is multiple stories, not a single narrative. At the Weltmuseum, Relics Of Abundance sits alongside Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream, an ongoing work that some may have caught at Design Museum’s exhibition “More than Human” last summer. And our multispecies banquet Refuge For Resurgence at the Venice Biennale first inspired Claudia to commission our studio.
Refuge for Resurgence invites audiences into mythic time when precarious climate upended our old ways of order and control. In their place, a new way of being emerged. A dining table is set, and each guest at the table - child, wolf, mushroom - is given equal standing, with table-settings handcrafted from detritus but made with extraordinary care. Our then colleague Leanne Fischler had combed the shores of Orkney to find flotsam and jetsam to make the cutlery, using jewellery-making techniques. Knives from brake lights and lichen-covered branches, spoons from vintage tea caddy scoops. Jon and I used kintsugi to salvage old platesm, writing a story of ruin and rebirth for the table, and Nicola Ferrao illustrated it across the plates, each one telling the story of a creature and the bonds that held them together. Ed and his father rescued a dead oak tree and crafted it, slowly, against the thickness of the aged grain - into a magnificent table that became the refuge.
The idea of decentring the human isn’t new. It’s only new to the traditions that centred the human in the first place. Across India, sacred groves have been protected by communities for centuries, governed by the understanding that these spaces belong to something larger than us, and that taking from them without reciprocity invites consequences for everyone. From the forests of Himachal Pradesh to the kavus of Kerala, these are technologies of ecological accountability that long predate anything the sustainability industry has come up with. The multispecies banquet carries that same spirit: the idea that the table must be set for everyone, not just us. The hopeful future that it promises is already old.
This spirit of reciprocity extends through traditions of storytelling. Myth-making and material knowledge exists across every culture on earth. And so, the storyworlds and objects we build in The Craftocene are our attempt to create storytelling possibilities you can physically inhabit, a co-imagined myth that acknowledges our ecological interconnectedness with the planet. It becomes a container to place ideas in, a guide that can move us from the overwhelming paralysis of the present towards an embodied understanding that craft, care and imagination can lead us forward.
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Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream asks what artificial intelligence could become if trained on centuries of ecological knowledge held in the body, language, and the land. And how might turning to AI, the very technology that currently devours energy and data at astonishing scale, help us turn towards ecological attunement rather than accelerate extraction? The “solutions,” the carbon calculators, the green growth pledges, the sustainable AI initiatives, tend to leave the underlying logic untouched. We wanted to try something else.
In our speculative work, we placed four handcrafted sculptural sensor-objects along the Thames to observe birdsong, tides, cloud formations and other atmospheric shifts. Each sensor - Sound, Water, Sky and Wind - is embedded with open-source electronics and custom code that feeds a small, specialist language model (Chorus for Sound, Silt for Water, Gaze for Sky, Breeze for Wind). This will cross-reference live ecological signals against a larger model trained on a corpus of British and European weatherlore: folk-rhymes, proverbs and oral traditions collected from the 1870s to the present, knowledge that commercial large language models are not designed to prioritise.
Kerala’s fishing communities read monsoon patterns through cloud formations and the behaviour of specific bird species, knowledge refined over generations and passed orally. When peacocks cry in India, we know rain will follow. Polynesian wayfinding traditions navigate thousands of miles of open ocean by reading wave patterns, star positions, and the flight of seabirds, a form of ecological computation that requires no silicon. And the Thames itself was once a sacred river. For centuries, communities along its banks understood it as alive, communicative, temperamental. Much of that has been paved over, literally and figuratively. But fragments remain, and our research into weather lore and river lore turned up astonishing depths of local ecological intelligence that large language models are not designed to prioritise.
The inversion at the heart of the work is this: the river prompts us. Instead of humans querying machines, screens display poetic invitations to pay attention, to learn to attune our bodies, heart and spirit towards the rhythms of the river.
The struggle over AI is ultimately a struggle over which ways of knowing are allowed to shape the world. Édouard Glissant wrote about what he called opacity, the right of cultures and beings to not be fully understood or translated into dominant frameworks. The river has a right to speak in a language we don’t fully comprehend, and the AI in this work isn’t a translation engine rendering the river legible to capital. It’s closer to a bridge language, creating a shared grammar of attention between human and more-than-human worlds, while honouring what remains opaque.
All three works are, in the end, acts of storytelling. Myth-making and material knowledge exist across every culture on earth. The storyworlds and objects we build in The Craftocene are our attempt to create storytelling possibilities you can physically inhabit, a co-imagined myth that acknowledges our ecological interconnectedness with the planet. A container to place ideas in, a guide that can move us from the overwhelming paralysis of the present towards an embodied understanding that craft, care and imagination can lead us forward.
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Bringing our speculative archaeologies in direct conversation with objects from the Weltmuseum’s permanent collection is particularly exciting for us. Showcasing ethnographic histories is a highly contested space. Whose histories are spoken of, what stories in the taxonomy are left out? At the same time, walking through the Weltmuseum’s collection, we were struck by how much knowledge is embedded in objects, how much agency they already have as storytellers in their own right. A Piaroa mask sits near our speculative prayer bead made from a TV remote. They hold equal weight because they are both encoding a relationship between people and forces larger than themselves. The difference is that one tradition understood this openly, and the other, ours, buried it under layers of market logic.
We have been taught to look at, decode and diagnose, the stories of other cultures and times, yet spend little time casting the same analytical eye on our own myths. Having our speculative works placed within the context of ethnographic histories, in the same vitrines as the museum collection, collapses the artificial distance between the cultures we study and the one we’re living in. The civilisation we’re looking at is ours.
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Glissant proposed understanding cultures through their entanglement rather than through hierarchy or comparison, what he called “relation.” The Craftocene at the Weltmusem opens up the space to do this; time, culture, and geography fold into each other. Questions become possible that were harder to ask before. Who gets studied? What do our own objects reveal about us? And the question that runs through the whole show, the one we keep coming back to: what kind of ancestors are we becoming?
The Craftocene is the space where all of these threads tangle together. The knowledge system we are proposing to understand our current Anthropocene predicament is built on two conditions: reciprocity and resourcefulness. Reciprocity, because every object in this exhibition points to a relationship. And resourcefulness, because the ability to pick something up, understand its properties, and find a new purpose for it is not a quaint survival skill. It is the most relevant form of intelligence we have.
The Craftocene takes the remnants and waste of one way of living, and with care and ingenuity shows how it might be turned, slowly, into something that might carry a different story. It is an ongoing investigation, there are no neat conclusions, and we don't pretend to have arrived anywhere final. But we have our hands in the material of the world, and our hearts in the shared stories we tell one another, and we are endeavouring to find out. For us, there is a particular kind of knowledge that only comes through making, and imagining through the physical encounter with obsidian and lead and foraged aluminium cans and thatching hay, through the patient labour of crafting something by hand. When the machines have all been designed to go faster, we stubbornly insist, through the materials we work with, that other worlds are not only possible but are already taking shape.
The present is never finished. There is still, as Le Guin wrote, room in the bag of stars.
- By Anab Jain and Jon Ardern