Atlas of the New World is a photographic journey through our planet’s future vistas, a visual map of landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes transformed by the climate crisis. As a rule, photography captures the present, but this project attempts to show the future. Using scientific data, the project presents photography as a “true lie”, superimposing images of future scenes onto real places, projecting them for an instant while the shutter clicks. The environmental crisis is thus made visible in the present, rendering tangible that which would otherwise remain abstract.

The technique adopted by Edoardo Delille and Giulia Piermartiri is based on a completely analogue process. Slides that contain images of future vistas are projected for a moment onto the actual surroundings using a flash. As the shutter clicks, the subjects in the portraits do not see what is being projected onto them, and continue to move and behave spontaneously within their reality. The final image is a result of this temporary melding of present and future: a metaphorical vision imprinted onto a photograph, conveying the idea of a future that spins further out of our control every day, superimposed on our present.

The photographs are at once evocative and unsettling: vibrant colours capture the eye, but beneath the outward beauty hides an urgent message. This interplay of narrative layers invites us to reflect on the fragility of our world and the need to take action, portraying climate change not only as a challenge for the present, but also as a critical question for the future. Atlas of the New World is thus not only a work of art, but also an instrument of knowledge, a bridge linking science, art and imagination.

In The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh writes about “a crisis of the imagination”, about our inability to truly comprehend climate change. The Atlas answers this challenge by transforming future scenarios and data into tangible images. Here, the past, present and future are interwoven: the world is no longer a static thing, but is instead in continuous flux. To imagine the future becomes an act of resistance and possibility.

The way in which we imagine the future will affect how that future unfolds. This is why we must imagine a future that goes beyond fear, one that is not limited to recording what is lost, but which is able to chart a course for new horizons. Atlas of the New World is not simply a record of what we stand to lose, but a visual manifesto for re-imagining our future.