adrienne maree brown wrote that she believed we are currently waging ”an imagination battle.” Her work concerns many aspects of identity and identification, and I have no intention to re-use her words here and so risk to make less of the struggles and battles she wages on improving lives; but the idea - of imaginations wrestling in a struggle for supremacy - struck a real chord, as an idea that sits well in my line of work.

There are loads of conversations about the fault lines between human-made and machine-generated creativity, between art that comes from the brush at the end of a hand versus the Photoshop Plug-in, before we even begin with the tussles between ideas and idealism when it comes to design project’s and their aims or dreams.

And imagination - and the liberating situations where it can flourish and fly - isn’t restricted to the ‘creative services’ sector. There can’t be many who don’t recognise (despite the cognitive dissonance that those with the luxury of space to enjoy it - and the inverse proportion it appears to effect towards sharing it, given the access to privilege or private assets) or can see that imagination is such a powerful seed it must be nurtured outside of contracted hours or obligations to contracted time. Time ‘owned’ as a quasi-filial obligation to an employer isn’t often where imagination can find its feathers. 

If we want our collective imagination’s to free ourselves, we need the space to let it do so. And this isn’t a peon to ‘quiet quitting’ - that simply replaces time spent doing for others as a negation of your potential - I’d much rather encourage a ‘Quietly working’, where, free(er) of the constraints of ‘do this’ ‘by then’ and ‘only here’ you can find a space to think.

And this is a call to us all against the enclosure of so-called private ownership of both mind and landscapes, against the common wealth of thinking. Against the right to roam in body and mind. Against and to arrest the basic human instinct to walk, stop, look at the sky, stars, and dream.

There’s so little space currently, both in our self-circumscribed digital spaces - which jostle for your attention and nag for likes, replies, updates, feedback and votes - and the physically ones, deterring and denying with ‘no entry’, ‘private’, ‘no access’, ‘no turning’, ‘this is mine so you best piss-off’ signs, perhaps recently best captured in the popular, er-hmm, imagination, by the decision on banning wild camping on one landowner’s landhogging of 4000 acres of landscape that he determined should be for his commercial and personal benefit only - we should be up in arms.

Imagination, that most precious ability to dream and which gifts us everything from Art to AI to ideas about ideas for tackling cancer, poverty, inequality - is a faculty that needs space. 

Mind-space and actual space. 

Anyone and any vested interest (that is vested in themselves to the active exclusion of others, even when those offer no harm) that seeks to fence you out or bar you away can, and forgive my rather unimaginative language, fuck right off.

It’s high time to reclaim your space and the right of your imagination to roam.