Picture Your Futures with Consent: A practice for one, or a few, or a room
This activity is creating a collage of the consent futures we are dreaming, growing and working for. Collage is a form of art-making in which various materials or objects, such as cut-up magazines, items found in nature, or photographs, are stuck onto a large surface.
You can do this as a tabling activity or with two friends. At a student club, staff meeting or a community centre. It works at every one of those sizes, and each one is the whole thing in miniature.
The invitation
It's 2045, consent now shapes how we treat each other, how decisions get made, and how we live with the land.
What does a world with consent feel like?
What does a world with consent look like, sound like, smell like, taste like?
How does a world with consent change where we learn and work?
What do our friendships and our families sound like?
What does it feel like to move through your community?
What is your relationship to the land?
Build what you see. Words, pictures, drawings, whatever you have. Start with one thing that pulls at you and follow it.
Prep: Gather
Half the joy of making a collage is in gathering materials to get you started. Check in with your school to see if they would contribute as well as gather from home, including:
Photographs. You might want to print off a photograph of yourself to put in your collage, or one you have taken of objects.
Old books work better than magazines, since thicker paper takes glue without wrinkling or tearing. Discarded encyclopedias, old textbooks, illustrated field guides, and atlases. Magazines, newspapers, flyers, seed catalogues, old calendars, wrapping paper, greeting cards, packaging, ticket stubs and printed photos all belong in the pile too.
Scissors, glue sticks, and something sturdy to stick the collage to. Card, watercolour paper, or construction paper cut to 8 by 10. With a group, more scissors and glue than seems necessary.
Markers, paint pens, coloured paper, tape and stickers if you have them.
Make it digitally. Use free services such as Canva. Still take the time to gather items. Remember consent with image making only using images you create or that are found in the public domain: University of Toronto has a great list of images that are free and available: https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/c.php?g=251874&p=2772394
Ways in
Cut first, plan later. Pulling out whatever catches you before deciding what the piece is about tends to work better than the other way round. A theme shows up on its own once there is a pile. No need to copy something you liked elsewhere. Your mood and whatever you found will do the shaping.
Laying it out before gluing. Most people glue too early and then wish they had layered something underneath. Moving things around, walking away, coming back.
Big things first. Backgrounds, then middle pieces, then the small details on top. Hands stay cleaner, and glue does not smudge across whatever you care most about.
Off-centre. Dead centre is the least interesting place for the thing you want people to look at. About a third of the way in tends to hold the eye.
Depth. Bigger pieces low on the page read as close to you. Smaller pieces higher up read as far away. That alone turns a flat sheet into a place you could walk into.
Cut edges and torn edges. Scissors give a hard line. Tearing gives a soft white edge that dissolves into whatever is behind it. Lighter paper tears more gently than heavy stock.
Cut a hole in something. Take an image, remove part of it, and put something else behind. A window where a face was. Sky where the coffee should be. This one move opens almost any collage up.
Unlike things beside each other. Old beside new, something tiny beside something enormous, a leaf beside a highway. The gap between them is where the meaning arrives.
Softening straight edges. If a piece looks pasted on, a scrap or a torn strip laid over the border settles it in.
Drawing on it. Outlining cut edges with a marker or writing in your own handwriting pulls a piece together.
Mess is welcome. Ripples, tears, glue marks, crooked edges. It is paper. There is nothing here to ruin.
A heavy book on top while it dries keeps it from curling.
On glue: ordinary glue sticks are fine and cheap enough to buy a dozen. An acid-free glue stick or matte medium is worth the extra few dollars for something you want to keep.
Setting the Mood:
Materials in the middle rather than in individual piles. Someone finding an image you would never have chosen is half the point, and it is the practice in small: what you make is better because other people were in the room.
Music, low and easy, or a shared playlist people add to as they arrive. Silence makes people feel watched.
Snacks that will not wreck the art. Pretzels, crackers, cut veg, cookies. Anything dry, and napkins nearby.
An hour is about right. Twenty minutes of making is plenty, but people arrive slowly and warm up slowly, and the talking that happens over the table is most of what you came for.
No need to go around asking people to explain their piece. Anyone who wants to say something will.
If somebody is frozen, cutting out one word they like and gluing it down usually unsticks them.
Create one big future
A group can also work on a single collage together. A larger sheet in the middle, everyone adding as they go. This suits a short window, or a room where people feel shy about making something of their own.
Two things worth knowing. It gets crowded fast, so six or eight people to a sheet is about the limit. And whether people can work on each other's pieces is better agreed at the start than discovered halfway through. Which is, itself, the practice.
A note
This is about imagining a future built on care, accountability and respect. Nobody has to talk about their piece, show it to anyone, or post it. Worth saying once at the start, then leaving alone.
Sharing yours:
A photo taken straight on in decent light. Daylight near a window beats anything overhead.
Post on your own social if you want, with #ConsentAwarenessWeek2026.
If you made these with other people, ask each person before posting theirs. Making something is not the same as agreeing to show it, which is the whole point of this.
Keeping yours to yourself is a complete ending too.