This is an open and expansive list of critical readings, conversations, tools, and resources gathered around the idea and practice of radical, and radicalising our imagination.
Moving from academic work with indigenous leaders and social movements, to inquiries with contemporary artists and speculative fiction writers, this space is a subjective, non exhaustive, and continuously-in-progress well in which one can dig and possibly gather new ideas, references, and inspirations to sustain their work, community, and practice. Take it, or leave it…
Artwork: Mohamed Melehi Flames Poster designed for Special issue “For a Palestinian Revolution” (1967) of the Moroccan magazine Souffles Anfas
Radical Imagination through Social Movements
The Radical Imagination Project by Max Haiven & Alex Khasnabich
Active until 2017, the Radical Imagination Project tried to answer the following questions:
How can we understand the radical imagination as more than a hollow slogan? How can it be a critical tool for building movements to reclaim our world from a renegade form of capitalism rooted in sexism, racism, homophobia, mass incarceration, the illegalization of migrants and the destruction of the earth?
Through extensive research and participation within many social movements, authors Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabich have developed a conspicuous body of work trying to offer tools and learnings for organisers, community leaders, researchers and more.
Highlights:
Lessons from Social Movements: Six Notes on the Radical Imagination Throughout
Radical Imagination through Art as a Prefigurative Practice and Social Imagination
The Art of Assembly
The Art of Assembly“ is a nomadic series of lectures and conversations, gathering protagonists from various fields of art, activism and theory to speculate on the potential of assemblies in a time when not much seems certain.
Explore:
https://art-of-assembly.net/
Visible Project
Since 2010, Visible researches, produces and connects long-term socially engaged art projects, working with artists dealing with the urgencies of our times such as the climate crisis, social justice, indigenous rights, gender and queer-based violence.
Their website is a rich archive and critical platform to research the work of some of the most influential and radical art practitioners of our time.
Explore:
https://www.visibleproject.org/
Radical Imagination through Watery Worlds
Feeled Lab
The FEELed Lab is a collaborative and interdisciplinary environmental humanities field lab located on unceded Syilx territory, in Kelowna, BC. Their activities support curiosity, inquiry and action for living well with human and non-human beings in the Okanagan watershed and beyond. The lab’s work is grounded in hydrofeminist principles and the thinking of scholar Astrida Neimanis, director of the lab, as it insists on the messy and necessary amplification of feminist, queer, crip, anticolonial, and antiracist perspectives to address the tangled challenges of social and environmental crisis. We also make room for joy.
Explore:
https://thefeeledlab.ca/
Ocean Archive
Ocean-Archive.org is an online platform that investigates the potential of storytelling and transdisciplinary collaboration within and beyond archival practices. It strives to expand critical ocean literacy in a time of great necessity and catalyzes collective action for a living Ocean. The aim of Ocean-Archive.org is to bring together the multitude of voices and journeys around the Ocean and connect those striving to nurture and protect it. With ocean comm/uni/ty, the platform instigates conversations around the Ocean so that members can connect and co-create. Designed as a storytelling and pedagogical tool, Ocean-Archive.org translates current knowledge into a shared language that fosters synergy among art, science, policy, and conservation and enables us to make better
decisions for urgently needed policies.
Highlights:
Aridity Lines Podcast Series
Seafloor Futures: A Garden Website
Drexciya
“To the standard electro palette of analog synths and 808s, Drexciya added a bubbly variety of wet-sounding keyboard lines, plus echoey sonar pings, depth charges and diving sounds.”
Drexciya was a techno duo from Detroit, a pioneer in the intersection of eco-criticism, afrofuturism, and anti-racism in their work. Their music built on an underwater myth: Drexciya being an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women who were thrown off of slave ships; the babies had adapted to breathe underwater in their mothers' wombs.
Dive in…
Drexciya - The Quest (part 1) 1997
Radical Imagination through Magical Realism & Speculative Fiction
Sanabel Abdel Rahman
As one of the project initiators of this toolkit, we want to here reference and invite you to further explore the research and work of Sanabel Abdel Rahman around speculative fiction and magical realism as part of a struggle towards liberation.
Here you can find articles and publications offering her perspective.
Octavia’s Parables
Beginning with The Parable of the Sower, Octavia’s Parables is a podcast and web space hosted by Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown examining each of Octavia E Butler’s published works, chapter by chapter. The podcast summarizes the storyline, places it in a strategic context for those intending to change the world, and provides questions to help bring Butler's ideas to life.
Tune into it:
Reading Octavia
Guiding questions
How do we connect with others at the level of the imagination?
What routines can help ‘guard’ the imagination from the distorted images coming from our daily realities?
How can your practice inform magical materialism?
How can we create conditions for collective dreaming rather than individual fantasy?
How might our practice create refuge without becoming insular or disconnected from material conditions?
Have there been any failures or misfires in your practice that have taught you something about imagination's limits or possibilities?
What is a future you would like to fully believe in without fear?
What world do we want to inhabit?
