Weaving Dreams into Realities explores how imagination can be rediscovered as a starting point for joint actions, collective movements, and as catalysts for social and political change today.
From September to December 2022, the programme gives spaces to artists, activists, academics and other practitioners which in very different ways set political imagination as the premise of their work and contest the immense material as well as imaginative desolation. The invited practitioners facilitate the creation of affective environments, dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalize the local”, fight for concrete forms of international solidarity, commoning and possibilities of mutual support, and seek to nourish interdependent and community-based economic systems.
In workshops, talks and sensual artistic arrangements the relation between imagination and practice will be explored, dreams of liberation from the past will be revisited, current practices of resistance and common struggle against planetary destruction will be discussed, in order to reclaim imaginations as a political sphere, for what does not yet exist, but could.
DREAMSCAPING — A workshop on Dreamscaping with students from Zeppelin University, led by Jeanne van Heeswijk together with performance artist Vishnu Vardhani Rajan and educator Sophie Mak-Schram, aims to develop a “stewardship curriculum” for the use of Toward Sanctuary Dome (5–7 September 2022).
Toward Sanctuary Dome (Philadelphia Assembled, 2017), a learning object by Jeanne van Heeswijk shown with Parachute (Carmen Papalia, 2019), is a geodesic structure for personal and collective refuge. It transformed the White Box into a space for sharing stories, resting, and learning about what it might mean to care not only for oneself but also for others.
CONTRIBUTIONS — Armen Avanessian, Centre for Plausible Economies (Kathrin Böhm, Kuba Szreder), Maciej Chmara, Maria Hlavajova, Institute of Radical Imagination, Laut Kollektiv, Sophie Mak-Schram, Massimiliano Mollona, Claude Nassar, Zeyno Pekünlü, Vishnu Vardhani Rajan, Dmitry Vilensky.
Presented at the Whitebox, Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen. Supported by Baden-Württemberg Stiftung, Fränkel Stiftung and Sparkasse Bodensee.