Constellation 5:
RE-IMAGINING
Cornelius Castoriadis argues that every society produces a social imaginary: shared assumptions through which particular futures come to appear natural, inevitable, and desirable. [1] Institutions themselves emerge from these imaginaries, shaping not only how life is organised but also whose futures become imaginable.
Within cultural institutions, imagination is often encouraged rhetorically while being constrained practically. We are invited to “think differently” within funding frameworks that rarely allow deviation, to propose “radical ideas” within structures that reward familiarity, to imagine futures while remaining bound to the same temporal, financial, and bureaucratic conditions that produced the present.
Imagination becomes a managed resource.
I began to wonder what kinds of imagination are not legible within these systems. What kind of futures remain unfundable, unrepresented, and unrecognised? Because imagination is not neutral either, it is trained, disciplined, and shaped by what we are shown is possible.
Octavia’s Brood insists that speculative imagination is a political practice rooted in lived struggle. [2] This reframes how imagination is not escapism, but a methodology. Not a fantasy detached from reality but a rehearsal for different forms of survival. The stories we tell about the future shape what we believe we can build in the present. Speculation becomes less of a form of escape than a rehearsal for collective survival, allowing people to imagine structures that do not yet exist but might nevertheless become possible.
But, within cultural institutions, imagination is frequently separated from material change. We are encouraged to imagine inclusivity, without redistributing power. To imagine accessibility without restructuring timelines and deliverables. To imagine care without changing labour conditions. To imagine equity without confronting extraction. It produces a particular fatigue, a sense of repetition without transformation. The feeling that imagination itself is being used to sustain a system that remains unchanged.
I notice how often the future is spoken about in the cultural space as though it is already pre-formatted. Strategic plans, vision statements, roadmaps. The language of futurity often borrows from administration rather than liberation. Mark Fisher’s notion of capitalist realism feels relevant here. The difficulty is not a lack of imagination but the narrowing of what can be collectively imagined as realistic. [3]
I think about how many practitioners learn to narrow their imagination in order to survive professionally. To self-edit ideas before they are spoken. To translate radical impulses into fundable language and anticipate institutional limits before proposing anything to disrupt. Over time, their imagination becomes cautious and limited.
Black Quantum Futurism offers a way of understanding time as non-linear, relational, and collectively produced. Past, present, and future remain entangled rather than unfolding sequentially. [4] This resonates with Prefix: RE, where returning is never about repetition but about revisiting, reworking, and remaining in relation to unfinished conditions.
Imagination can then become a question of access. Who is allowed to imagine themselves in the future when they are consistently positioned as temporary, precarious or replaceable. Who is denied their continuity.
Jose Esteban Muñoz similarly describes futurity as a horizon that remains partially beyond the present. For Munoz, queerness is not fully located in the here and now, but exists in glimpses of worlds that have not yet arrived. [5] This feels important because many institutional futures operate as though only one future is possible. Together, these frameworks challenge the assumption that the future unfolds equally for everyone. Instead, futures are already distributed unevenly; some are made available, others are structurally withheld.
Who is allowed to imagine themselves in the future at all?
Cultural institutions frame imagination as a resource they can host. Spaces designed to “unlock creativity,” yet these structures often remain bound by the same exclusions they claim to transcend. Time is still scarce, care is still in the peripheral, and access is still conditional. I have learned to be wary of spaces that celebrate imagination but resist implementation. Because imagination, when separated from action, can become another form of deferral. Another way of delaying accountability while appearing progressive.
What would it mean to build and imagine at the same time? Levitas argues that utopia functions not as a perfect destination, but as a method for imagining alternative social arrangements. [6] Working towards a better space while acknowledging the things that precede and limit it. Utopia, therefore, functions less as a destination than as a way of asking different questions about the present.
Emergent Strategy insists that change is iterative, relational, and shaped through scale. [7] Small interactions, repetition, and adaptations all matter. Transformation is cumulative rather than spectacular. Imagination is not a singular breakthrough moment but a continuous practice of noticing and adjusting.
I have been thinking about maintenance. Maintenance is often what keeps collective life possible, yet it rarely appears in narratives of innovation. Cleaning, translating, repairing, resting, checking in, or adjusting access. Maintenance rarely appears in institutional stories about transformation. We celebrate innovation while overlooking the labour that allows anything to continue. Mierle Laderman Ukeles challenged this separation decades ago, insisting that maintenance is not opposed to creativity but one of its essential conditions. [8]
Without maintenance, nothing continues. Yet maintenance remains culturally undervalued because it prioritises continuity rather than novelty. These acts are not secondary to imagination; they are what allow imagination to persist materially. Without maintenance, imagination collapses into abstraction.
I do not think that re-imagining is about escaping the present; it is about including the present that already leaks through, where people already refuse, where alternative practices already exist in fragile or unrecognised forms.
Rebecca Solnit reminds us that hope is not certainty, but orientation towards possibility without guarantees. [9] I think this is an important place to finish this chapter, not with resolution, but with a hope that things can improve, orientate, and be re-imagined in a way that centres care and inclusion while being absent of tokenistic gestures and inequitable methodologies.
Re-imagining begins here. Not with a finished vision of the future, but by expanding the conditions under which different futures become imaginable. I have come to believe that imagination is already happening in the small, often unrecognised practices that run throughout this publication: in acts of care, in shared knowledge, in maintenance, in access, in refusal, and in the relationships people continue to build despite institutions that were never designed to sustain them. Re-imagining is therefore not the final constellation because it offers resolution. It is the final constellation because imagination keeps every other constellation in motion. Without it, there is nothing to redistribute, there is nothing to re-build, nothing to re-work, and no community to sustain. Prefix: RE has never been about returning to what was. It has always been about remaining open to what might yet become.
NOTES:
[1]
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. by Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
[2] Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, eds, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2015).
[3] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009).
[4] Black Quantum Futurism, Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice (Philadelphia: Afrofuturist Affair, 2015).
[5] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
[6] Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
[7] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017).
[8] Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition "CARE" (1969), in Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, ed. by Patricia C. Phillips (Munich: Prestel, 2016)
[9] Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016).