Responding to artist Patte Loper's exhibition Laboratory for Other Worlds, this volume presents a range of transdisciplinary essays to propose a design process for living with and beyond ecological damage. Weaving together cosmologies of Western science, Indigenous American epistemologies, and European folkloric sources, this volume demonstrates how exhibitions can be utilized as living forms of knowledge and pedagogy. Attesting that the climate crisis is as much cultural as it is physical, contributors argue how much experimenting and engaging with artwork, installations and designed objects can teach us about 'damaged worlds'.

Scholars and practitioners across art, design, anthropology, climate science, museum studies and poetry respond to Loper's ongoing collaborative exhibition – an installation on the variable sea level rise in the United States that combines a cluster of maps, sculpture, painting, ephemeral performance, jewellery, and other interactive elements – to consider debates around practices of preservation and care. Richly illustrated throughout and drawing on multiple sources from Christian iconography to Surrealist totemic imagery, they speculate about:

- A future salt marsh represented by a large-scale map, created from panels of cotton canvas
- Sculptural reliquaries holding precious and sacred remains
- Wearable objects made from coastal debris
- Artwork reflecting Dakota epistemology
- Performance as a cultural response to crises facing wetlands.

Putting forward a design process that makes climate science accessible and public, this volume illustrates how interdisciplinary collaboration can generate new forms of refuge and relational knowledge in a damaged world.

Eugenia Kisin is Associate Professor of Art and Society at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, USA. A visual anthropologist by training, she is the Artistic Director of the Gallatin WetLab, an art–science laboratory and teaching gallery on paggank / Governors Island. Her research and teaching on contemporary art foregrounds the decolonization, critical museology and environmental justice movements. She is the author of Aesthetics of Repair: Indigenous Art in an Age of Reconciliation (2024).

Patte Loper is Professor of Practice in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, USA. She is an interdisciplinary artist based in painting who experiments with sculpture and video. Exhibited nationally and internationally, her work has been reviewed in Flash Art, Artnet, Time Out, Chicago, and the Boston Globe, and features in the collections of the Rene di Rosa Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and the Tacoma Art Museum.