This presentation explores how acts of make‑believe, collaborative storytelling, and shared invention can serve as powerful artistic methods for navigating contemporary anxieties around climate change, displacement, loss, and cultural memory. Drawing on two long‑term, collaborative projects — The Fondamento Dello Scherzo and The Lost

Village of Slynde — I examine how fictional institutions and invented landscapes can nevertheless generate genuine emotional resonance, community engagement, and creative wellbeing.

The first project, Fondamento Dello Scherzo, imagines a philanthropic arts foundation that never existed, but which nevertheless enabled genuine artistic dialogue, collaboration, and production. Created in response to post‑pandemic uncertainty, the foundation provided an imaginative framework that made experimentation feel possible again.

The second project, The Lost Village of Slynde, emerges from the re‑appearance of a once-flooded Sussex settlement during drought conditions. Working collectively with artists Jo Lamb and Isobel Smith, we combined archival research, oral histories, local mythologies, and imaginative reconstruction to build a vivid portrait of a place that is both historical and speculative. As the reservoir receded, so too did the boundary between fact and fiction, allowing participants and visitors to explore themes of loss, belonging, and environmental change in a playful yet reflective way.

Together, these projects propose that invented landscapes and collaborative fictions can act as therapeutic tools — enabling artists and communities to process uncertainty, rebuild agency, and re‑enchant the world around them through collective play.