Radical imagination (SOLD)

36″ x 36″ x 1.5″ mixed media on wood. 

I’m hung up on the idea of the ‘radical imagination’ lately and these ruminations inspired this painting. The radical imagination is the “ability to imagine the world, life, and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be. It is the courage and the intelligence to recognize that the world can and should be changed” (Khasnabish & Haiven, 2014).

Radical is a word that often gets a bad rap, especially lately. The word radical is derived from the Latin word for ‘rooted’. Radical means to go to the root, dig deep and expose what’s not self-evident. The radical imagination, therefore, exposes how forms of oppression keep reproducing themselves and imagines otherwise. Beautiful, isn’t it?!

It’s a pretty fundamental concept to doing social justice and I remember spending a week on it a couple years ago in my social justice course when we were learning about ‘crip futurity’ – imagining an accessible future (disability rights movement). We also explored the idea of resurgence in the context of Indigenous rights. Resurgence is part of this radical imagination – imagining a future in which Indigenous people and cultures do more than just resist, they resurge. A student group did a presentation on the brilliant project ‘(Re)imagining Attiwapiskat’ in which participants engaged in artistic outputs to actively imagine a new way of being and seeing in the present to enable a movement of resurgence.