‘Imagine a place that nobody has ever been to. It has no borders. You don’t know much about it, but you sense it may have a lot to offer. Imagine this place is about to become available. Not only for you.

Nobody has ever been there, there are no rules there. Is it dangerous? Shouldn’t we create the rules now, for us and for the others? Remember: law is not retroactive. You and your team have to predict various scenarios and make yourself prepared for the actions of those who play fair, and of those who don’t.’

Cosmos is a metaphor of the future world that in a dozen or so years will be created by, among bilions of others, the participants of the workshop. Today they are children. The youngest is 8 and the oldest 12. Which hopes and fears accompany their fantasies about the future? What is important and what is irrelevant for them?

We were trying to find the answers to those questions by using the workshop process. Each child received an object resembling a planet and was asked to come up with its story. Colorful pa erns on the surface of the objects represent deserts, forests, huge ivy to be avoided, craters filled with tiny cities of tiny people. Not everything is visible. In such small scale it is di cult to notice the work of the civilization of bacteria endowed with the intelligence of 6-year-old children or to understand the meaning of the ruthless guillotine-robots on the services of a boy exercising his absolute power. The imaginary fate of these worlds, the creatures inhabiting them and their relations with their neighboring planets served as a starting point of a sometimes turbulent discussion, and creation of the rules the rules of the new world.

Participants: Małgorzata, Lena, Oskar, Anastazja, Antonina, Apolonia, Estera, Nevena, Mikołaj, Filip, Kuba, Gustaw, Maurycy, Mikołaj, Tymon, Jan, Krzysztof, Szymon from the Democratic School in Łódź