IMAGINING ELSEWHERE, EXISTING OTHERWISE

This seminar locates imagination as a political and artistic necessity for practices of sensing, relating, and existing otherwise. This is an invitation to cultivate different ways of being in the world, grounded in the understanding that knowledge emerges through relationships with bodies, territories, waters, and the wider community of life. Together, seminar participants will explore practices of autonomy, reciprocity, joy, desire, and interdependence as foundations for artistic inquiry and world-making.

Through critical inquiry, collective experimentation, embodiment, and situated learning, participants will engage feminist, Indigenous, and autonomous approaches to knowledge-making. A central component of the seminar is a two-week field excursion to Mexico City, where participants will engage with locally led initiatives, feminist and Indigenous movements, autonomous cultural spaces, and grassroots educational projects. Through collective learning, cultural production, and self-organisation, these encounters offer opportunities to ‘‘imagine elsewhere” by breaking into practices that are fluid and autonomous, where shared responsibility, radical imagination, and

collective flourishing is at the centre.

Proposed Field Encounters:

Librería Amoxtli - A cooperative bookstore and cultural space hosting workshops, conversations, and community gatherings focused on territory, collective learning, and cultural exchange.

Mujeres y La Sexta - A feminist collective working alongside Indigenous and Zapatista communities to create spaces for dialogue, autonomy, care, and collective organising.

Escuela de Cultura Popular Mártires del 68 - A school dedicated to engraving, printmaking, and popular education, with extensive archives that trace histories of visual culture, collective memory, and social imagination.

ATEA - A self-organised cultural space bringing together artists, makers, and community initiatives working across media, printmaking, weaving, digital culture, food, and everyday forms of collaborative creation.

READING GUIDE:

As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2017) - Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2019) - Astrida Neimanis

Our Word Is Our Weapon (2002), Subcomandante Marcos,

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984) - Audre Lorde

The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way - Sara Ahmed

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) - Fred Moten & Stefano Harney

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020) - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014)- Glen Sean Coulthard

The seminar approaches learning as a lived, relational, and collective process. The field encounters offer pathways for “imagining elsewhere” by existing in the worlds we wish to inhabit. The readings accompany this process as guides to thinking with embodiment, relationality, autonomy, community, and collective becoming.