Rewilding Imagination Lab
at Firstsite, Colchester
The Rewilding Imagination Lab is a free monthly gathering for artists, creatives and the curious to come together for collective experimentation and exploration.
Led by artist Daniel & Clara, each session centres around a different theme explored through participatory creative exercises, immersive experiences and discussion.
Sitting somewhere between a creative workshop, performance space and a zone for collective dreaming, the Rewilding Imagination Lab is a place to test new ideas, disrupt habitual thinking and exercise the imagination. It is a radical space of uncertain outcomes that celebrates the weird, messy, complex dreaming creatures that we are – asking how we might think differently, create more freely, and to inspire a wilder and more embodied relationship to the worlds around us and within us.
The second half of each session will be an open platform where participants are invited to share work, test an idea or try something new for the first time.
This project has been made possible with the generous support of Arts Council England.
Lab #1 launches on 30th April
What
is Rewilding Imagination?
“Rewilding Imagination is about creative freedom, it is about becoming a little less domesticated, breaking down habitual thinking and behaviour, creating space for the impossible and peering into the unknown. It is a process of seeking the wild spaces within ourselves – those parts of ourselves that don't conform, don't fit neatly and can't easily be put into words. It's an open-ended process valuing ambiguity, free roaming creativity, unconditional generosity, chaos, complexity, community and difference.
Rewilding Imagination is about living in accord with one's inner call rather than under the influence of systems of control. To rewild the imagination is a rebellious act in a system that says we are only worthy of existence if we are productively contributing to the consumer machine – we say you exist and you matter as you are, whoever you are: as weird, messy, dreaming creatures! None of us fit neatly into boxes, we are not brands, we don't exist to serve algorithms and market trends – a rewilded imagination cannot be tamed.
Rewilding Imagination is both a solitary and collective adventure enacted with the knowledge that the world around us and the world within us are inexplicably entangled, what happens in one affects the other. To rewild the imagination is to create a fertile ground from which new possibilities of thinking, feeling and being can emerge – so let's rewild together!”
-
Daniel & Clara