The ability to imagine a liberated future is fundamental to building an alternative vision of how society can and should be organised. At times, this task feels impossible – urgent material demands cloud this vision and violent structural forces place limits on what we are able to conceive.
In speaking to the disparities that the pandemic has exposed, climate catastrophe and racialised violence, this conversation asks, how might we use imagination as a meaningful political tool to build a better world, how might we look beyond unmoored utopia’s and harness the imagination’s utility in the here and now?
How can we build a political imaginary that fosters both active resistance responding to material demands, but leaving space for care, joyful and the creative principles that underpin the process of imagining?
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, forthcoming from Hajar Press in 2021 and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
Jacob V Joyce is a Multidisciplinary artist amplifying historical and nourishing new queer/anti-colonial narratives. Their work ranges from afro-futurist world building workshops to mural painting, comic books, performance art and punk music with their band Screaming Toenail. Best known for their illustrations, Joyce has self published a number of books and illustrated international human rights campaigns for Amnesty International, Global Justice Now and had their comics in national newspapers.