Discover how writing can be used as a tool for crafting worlds that challenge the confines of reality and expand our visions for the future.
In this workshop, we’ll explore the practice of worldbuilding as a collective act of imagination. The focus of this exploration will be landscape, the natural world, ecological imaginaries, and the blurred boundaries of species and self as world building tools and narrative gestures. Formerly thought of as a passive resource, existing quietly in the background, landscape now, in times of ecological crisis, moves into the foreground. Together we will discover how writing can be used as a tool for crafting worlds that challenge the confines of reality and expand our visions for the future.
Worldbuilding is the part of the writing process (or any creative process) that sets up where your story takes place: events require a location, and we build this setting with words. But Worldbuilding has the potential to be more than creating a setting or background for a story. What if the background becomes the story?
During this workshop session we will engage in various writing exercises that invite you to explore a background of your choice and compost it into a world. It is an opportunity to explore alternative ways of living, thinking, and being. Whether you’re imagining a fantastical realm or reshaping familiar spaces, this process invites you to craft environments that reflect your values, hopes, and dreams. There will never be any pressure to share what you write, and you don’t have to be working towards one specific project or world; we will experiment with different kinds of techniques and ideas.
There’s no need to be an experienced writer either, and we’ll have plenty of prompts, suggestions and references in case you need inspiration.
This workshop takes place in Create.
Reserve your free tickets here.
About Anna
Anna Bierler is an artist, writer, and educator. Her practice considers storytelling, publishing processes and modes of collectivity. Using language as her main material her work materializes in experimental modes of publishing, reading performances, workshops, poetry and participatory installations. Her writing has appeared in Daisy World (Amsterdam), Robida (Topolò), hooops (Berlin), in the Anthology Dreams of dreams of dreams published by Onomatopee (Eindhoven).
Next to her own practice, she co-organizes the poetry collective OOOReading Club in Rotterdam since 2022, a community platform for writers and readers to experiment with language as a material – and the publishing platform afloat that explores the boundaries of climate catastrophe, storytelling, survivalism and worldmaking.
Among various collaborations, Anna is currently working on a script following the myth of Medusa into the present and exploring the intersection of existential dread in the anthropocene, geologic timescales, human experiences and animal-human relationships.
