The Imaginarium on the High Street
The Imaginarium marks a threshold between the High Street of the present and the past with the High Street of the future.
The Imaginarium is an exhibition and performance space on Dudley High Street which we’d planned to open in March this year. As we adhere to pandemic response measures and look towards a recovery phase we’re creating some early stage micro-opportunities for the doers and the curious of Dudley to inhabit the Imaginarium.
We’re giving careful consideration to what helps us all to be kind and mindful to help keep each other safe. We hope that through a collaboration with the Regeneration Team in Dudley Council we can extend outdoors across the pavement into a parklet, thereby having an outside space to connect, share dreams and develop experiments.
None of this in any way changes our aspiration for The Imaginarium to invite, encourage and help bring shape and story to a collective understanding of the future local people dream of.
Rediscovering and recreating the magic of place
In How to Save Our Town Centres, Julian Dobson asserts that: ‘Me towns’ of takers must become ‘we towns’ of makers, with a shared ambition to create a common future…
The challenge of change is an opportunity to think and to act differently. It is a chance to rediscover and recreate the magic of place, the local shared value that makes every town distinctive and generates pride in the work of our hands and our minds.
Explorations of Dudley’s present, past and possible futures inviting just this kind of rediscovery and recreation are being led by local creatives through CoLab Dudley. Though they haven’t been able to curate exhibitions, pose provocations and invite responses in The Imaginarium on the High Street during lockdown, they have been engaging and sharing with local people online.
Dudley People’s Archive
The Dudley People’s Archive curated by Dave O’Coy explores and celebrates Dudley’s rich heritage and vibrant present through photography, art, publications and stories. This work seeks to engage people and places that normal exhibitions and galleries might not easily reach. The archives are growing and collaborations emerging.
The Doers and The Curious of Dudley
The Doers and The Curious of Dudley is a celebration and representation of creative practices in and for Dudley. It encourages us all to think about how and why we might use and inspire creativity and curiosity in our day to day lives and places.
Portrait photographer Laura Dicken (@laura_dicken) instigated this collaboration with members of the CoLab Dudley Collective which has surfaced insights into the urgent and transformative role of creativity and curiosity in our lives. The wisdom drawn together through Laura’s conversations with other creatives relates to our individual and collective wellbeing and happiness, to the friendships and collaborations we are yet to build, to the alternative futures we need to imagine, and to the very fabric of the places we care deeply about.
Re-imagining systems, regenerative change and resilient relationships
In connecting inquiries like The Dudley People’s Archive and The Doers and The Curious with real life experiments and collective research and learning, a future imaginary for Dudley might gradually be cultivated (and healthily contested).
David Bollier has written in the latest issue of Stir to Action magazine:
The dsiruptions caused by COVID-19 are challenging countless premises of modern life, but there is no consensus yet on whether we should regard the pandemic as transitory interruption of ‘normal’ or an indictment of the modern state and capitalism, a.k.a. the market/state system.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we stand at a crossroads: shall we try to restore the fragile, integrated global markets dedicated to the neoliberal fantasy of unlimited economic growth even though it entails horrific disruptions of nature, racism, inequality and neocolonialism? Or shall we attempt to build a more distributed, eco-mindful, place-based system that is resilient and fair?
After first responders deal with the emergencies of this moment, we need some second responders to help emancipate us from an archaic worldview and ineffective institutions and infrastructures. We face huge temptations to revert to old ideological patterns of thought and politics, but the best way through the crisis is to re-imagine systems of provisioning and governance.
As David Bollier and Silke Helfrich have helped us to understand through their writing on commoning in Free, Fair and Alive, the ability to take action to create the future High Street emerges from within the relationships being nurtured. It is a latent capacity. The relationships themselves are a force of regenerative change, transformation and emergence.
The Imaginarium — on Dudley High Street, in our Virtual High Street, in collaborative creative explorations and provocations — is a supportive space for these relationships to form and develop, for trust to grow.
Too often in our lives we can experience transactional or passive connections. Through our work on Dudley High Street we seek to animate networks of friendship, reciprocity and mutual support which move at the speed of trust. As Adrienne Maree Brown explains in Emergent Strategy, moving at the speed of trust is about having a focus on critical connections more than critical mass; building resilience by building the relationships:
Many of us have been socialised to understand that constant growth, violent competition and critical mass are the ways to create change. But emergence shows us that adaptation and evolution depend more upon critical, deep and authentic connections, a thread that can be tugged for support and resilience.
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be sharing aspirations for other co-designed spaces on Dudley High Street which we hope will serve to deepen connections through rest and reflection, hands-on making and collective learning.
Do let us know if anything in this lab note resonated for you, raised questions, evoked emotions or got you curious about making a visit to The Imaginarium.
CoLab Dudley spaces on the High Street and the Virtual High Street will be available for collective experimentation and learning until at least December 2021. Contact me to find out more: lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk | 07501 722 255
