Name: Ancestral Utopias
Location: Battersea

Location

Battersea
The Hangar

Price

Free

Who could attend

Everyone

Type

Exhibition

Ancestral Utopias explores themes of ecological slow violence, ancestral knowledge, generational thinking, and long-term strategies for addressing the climate crisis.

Sustain Lab - one of the Royal College of Art’s longest-running student societies - presents Ancestral Utopias, the 2025 edition of the society’s annual exhibition.

In an age of environmental crisis, the exhibition explores how sustainability can be supported with the knowledge of our ancestors, asking: What have we forgotten from our ancestral past? What must be brought to the surface to help us to heal and rediscover kinship with the land? What might this look, feel, smell and sound like?

\In Ancestral Utopias, 39 current RCA students from 18 programmes unite in an interdisciplinary, interactive ceremonial display spanning digital media, installation, sculpture, painting, bio-lab and cultural developments, jewellery, print, ceramics, participatory performance, and sound.

This collective enquiry confronts the enduring legacy of ecological slow violence.
Through their indigenous ties, ancestral wisdom and rituals of care and reciprocity, the exhibiting artists offer visitors an opportunity to challenge and awaken their own connection with the environment.

In a moment when fast solutions often eclipse the importance of human relationships, Ancestral Utopias proposes slowness not as a delay, but as intent to create a better environment that spans generations, connecting our responsibilities to those who came before us and future generations.