Alicja Rogalska

Future Imaginaries: investigating and intervening in the political imaginary crisis through collaborative speculation

This interdisciplinary, practice-based research project examines how future-oriented socially-engaged art practice can contribute to our understanding of, and intervene in, the crisis of the political imaginary, building and expanding on the currently predominant activist and usefulness modes of socially-engaged art. Through practice and thesis, I ask: how can future-oriented collaborative art-making reconfigure notions of political imaginary and what agency does it exert in narrating desirable futures, especially in the context of environmental crisis?

Using speculative fabulation and utopia as methods of critically addressing crises of imagination, it involves devising new methodological tools (inventive devices) in collaboration with speculative designers, social scientists and activists and facilitating a series of participatory situations and environments to test them. Utilising various forms of collaborative art and film-making, it explores how post-capitalist desires and future visions can be expressed and narrated collectively in a simultaneously discursive, visual and material way.

The project aims to contribute to socially-engaged art methodology, practice and scholarship, following the recent interrogation of radical imagination and futurology in social sciences and philosophy.

Supervisors

• Richard Noble
• Susan Kelly

Website

• alicjarogalska.com