It’s a lesser known fact that the North Star overhead when the pyramids were built is not the same star as current, Polaris. And in about a thousand years, a completely different star will be our Pole Star. Because of a slight wobble in the Earth’s rotation, the position is not fixed. Our “guiding light” changes.

For the last few years American artist George Ferrandi has been uniting scientists, musicians, artists and arts organizations to collaborate with communities around the country in the invention of an answer to the question:

How on Earth will we say goodbye to Polaris?

George is developing the interdisciplinary initiative Jump!Star so that communities can ritualize how future generations might say goodbye to Polaris and hello to our next pole star, Gamma Cephei. Jump!Star has been hosting a series of themed dream-storming performance sessions called “Constellates,” which focus on the changing North Star as a way to engage in thinking deeply about the future and creating cultural customs (songs, dances, food, regalia, ritual objects) to welcome it. This is important because, as adrienne maree brown articulates, “We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.” Jump!Star embraces that responsibility by fore-fronting the role of traditionally excluded people in the invention of future culture, and prioritizing their agency in the reclamation of the futurist narrative. 

At its core, the Jump!Star initiative is about recalibrating our relationship with time by asking us to think about it on a much longer scale than we usually do. It asks us to visualize the future and our aspirations for it, allowing us the possibility to reverse-engineer those hopes into active decisions we make today.

Visit jumpstar.love for more complete information about the initiative and the artists, musicians, scientists and communities involved.