Hägendorf 2100 — Aldgate Edition

If 250 children can imagine the future of their village — why can't we imagine the future of our own neighbourhoods together?

Hägendorf 2100 — Aldgate Edition brings a collective vision of the future from a Swiss village to East London. In the original project, around 250 children imagined what their village could look like in the year 2100 — from housing and mobility to education, nature, work and technology — and painted their ideas together as a large-scale mural at their school.

In Aldgate, that process is not presented as a finished project but as the starting point for a new question. A video installation combines workshop documentation, drawings and text into a projected visual narrative in an East End public space — projected outside Toynbee Hall every night from 24 August to 6 September 2026, 8–11 pm, as part of Backyard Biennial.

Hägendorf is not offered as a model to copy. Instead, the work asks what might happen if communities in London were given room to question, rethink and co-design their surroundings: who gets to imagine the future of a place — and how could we begin to shape it together?

The projection was accompanied by the workshop “Imagine the Future of East London” at Whitechapel Gallery on 27 August 2026.