Dychmygu/Imagine
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”
- Arundhati Roy
“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary”
- Ursula K. Le Guin
“If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name”
– Adrienne Rich
Dychmygiadau tywys
Guided visualisations/meditations
Take our another-world-is-possible machine to an alternate now, and let your imagination run free! We have three different journeys (yn y Gymraeg/in English) for you to choose from…
explore a day in your life in your ideal future
explore a day as a non-human being
explore your radical imagination
There is also a guided meditation to discover your ‘inner potential’, with the help of trees and plants of the forest.
You might also want to visit your very own Imaginary Museum of an Imagined Utopias Bach or Ailddychmygu’r Oriel - Reimagine the art gallery
… or take a look at the results of other’s visualisations including Trawsffurfiad - Shape Shifting and with Ysgol y Ffridd, Gwalchmai
Using 2020 as a chance to reimagine the world
by Grist online magazine
“Ubuntu: The Dream of a Planetary Community”
By Mamphela Ramphele
“Building an Economy of Well-being and Indigenomics”
By Mark Anielski
“Telling a New Story”
By David C. Korten
Sgôr boced / thought experiments
Try out some of these scores as performance texts and see if they make something happen in the world, even if that ‘in the world’ is only in your brief imagining of potential enactments
Or try Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘A Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ to rethink sciencefiction, and the place of writing
What is the radical imagination?
If you want to find out about radical imagination, this paper by Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish is a great place to start. Lots of quotes and ideas
“the radical imagination in terms of horizons of socio-political possibility, the possibility of dynamic and shared visions animating and animated by individuals and collectives as they struggle. These visions guide their movements toward new social worlds. Exploring these horizons and their significance”
Or watch the videos of this “Urgency Intensive” online event, one of the most radical explorations of future thinking we’ve come across. We recommend you scroll to the bottom of the page and watch the second to last video “The Future (2161)” with Ama Josephine Budge, Julieta Aranda, Pauliina Feodoroff. Moderated by Prem Krishnamurthy.
You could also try Rob Hopkins’ podcast “From What If to What Next” which uses time travel and radical imagination to explore 2030 with different guests.
You can find the radical futures fiction that suits you, from Afrofuturism to ecotopia in this article by the Fix Solutions Lab
Dychmygu perthnasoedd wedi newid / Imagining changed relationships
Maniffesto o Le - A Manifesto of Place. Our vision for the future of Normal Site, Bangor University
Just Transition - a vision-led, unifying and place-based set of principles, processes, and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy
Growing the Planthropocene - imagining and cultivating plant-people conspiracies. A podcast with Dr Natasha Myers.
A Kriya for Cultivating Your Inner Plant
On Soil and Story - why technical ‘solutions’ come from a lack of radical imagination and how instead we can respond by tending to our all of relationships. A podcast with Gopal Dayaneni
Or try a Mycorrhizal Meditation with Feral Practice
Llyfrgell/Library
Visit our library for quotes, links, books, videos exploring imaginings of different ways of being… some of them are already here.
You may also be interested in some thoughts about Utopias, dystopias and heterotopias, ideas about revolution and about Bach and the Terrestrial…
And in our Collabatory there are some imaginings about how (and how not) to work together, how to create a Utopia Bach in a different way of relating to each other…
“Imagination is one of our mosts powerful tools.
What we imagine, we can become”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
Our guided visualisation work has been featured by Wales Arts International!
“It wasn’t until 2023 that humans recognised the severe form of psychological disorder they later called “Billionarism”,
a pathological form of cleptomania that causes sufferers to accumulate wealth at all cost.
By then, many had been caught up in the devastation caused by the untreated behaviour of the small number of sufferers, who were revealed masquerading as world leaders and oracles of decision making.
Thankfully, treatment was fast and simple.”
— A dream offered to Utopias Bach by Freya Lawton, May 2021