A new exhibition centers young people living around the Mau Forest to create rewilded visions for 2099.
‘Mau: A Forest Imaginarium’, opening in Nairobi on 17th October 2026, presents a speculative world created during an eight-week Safari Studio by Kairos Futura in and around Masese, on the edge of Kenya’s Mau Forest.
Through drawing, printmaking, sculpture, wearable design, installation, and collective storytelling, participants have imagined the Mau of 2099, with an exhibition that presents a fragment of that imagined future.
The exhibition grows out of The Safari Studio, Kairos Futura’s travelling arts and futures programme. The project works with young people living around landscapes of major ecological importance, using art and speculative worldbuilding as tools for thinking beyond the immediate pressures of the present.
Ideas developed during the studio range from new relationships between people and elephants, rituals, forest technologies, forms of forest protection, healing spaces and new ways of living within a recovering ecosystem.
About Kairos Futura
Kairos Futura is an arts futurist organisation working across Kenya and internationally to explore how imagination can become a practical tool for ecological and social change.
Its programmes combine immersive storytelling, speculative design, visual art, making and field-based learning to create spaces where young people can investigate possible futures for the places they live. Through projects including The Safari Studio, Wild Future Lab, Jungle Room and other experimental arts and futures programmes, Kairos Futura works at the intersection of culture, ecology and future-making.
