"The world is teeming with life, and we live within a pixel"
- Bayo Akomolafe
And Beyond was a participatory research lab and Playground for Collective Dreaming that ran from 2019 to 2023, under the stewardship of Amy Foster-Taylor and Will Bull. Through creative projects and partnerships with communities, organisations, and universities, we aimed to decolonise and democratise imagination and support the transition towards regenerative, equitable, and just futures.
Our work was founded on an understanding of the role of our imagination in shaping worlds and shaping change. Yet early on in our work, through different projects, in different forms, we kept encountering barriers to our capacity to imagine. It became evident that we couldn’t safely expand the collective imagination and explore new futures without contending with the wider context of Western modernity — its psycho-somatic imprints and structural impacts across different communities and on our conception of possibility. We recognised that the work of imagination was not simply about envisioning new futures, but rather about expanding our capacity to hold new futures within ourselves.
How can we create spaces to dream within systems of oppression?
What practices nurture and sustain a radical imagination?
How can an understanding of trauma support imagination practice and soften
the societal pressures that diminish our internal capacity to dream?
How can we ensure that opportunities are accessible and democratised?
How can the radical imagination enable us to change systems at a foundational level?
And how can our daily practices of interacting with the world shape restorative futures?
Throughout our work we aimed to:
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Deepen our understanding of the ontological function of the imagination: how it enables us to participate in reality, and forms the contours of our sociocultural experience through the creation of ‘worlds’.
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Interrogate the impact of modernity (its systemic patterns of oppression and inequality) on the psyche and imagination at a collective and individual level (with an emphasis on position, power, and privilege) and on our capacity for transformative change.
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Nurture the spaces, conditions, practices, and rituals that destabilise conventional ways of seeing, feeling, and knowing and allow us to cultivate a more intimate, harmonious relationship with ourselves, each other, and life itself.
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Explore, co-design, and support the development of the structures and systems that honour our social and ecological entanglement; creating and sustaining cultures of wholeness and communities of care.
Essays
To learn more about our work and insights, read:
Our work has also been featured in: Vogue Business, Aeffect Journal, Other Day, Fashion Revolution, Spirit of Design podcast, amongst others.
Projects
You can dive into a selection of projects and collaborations here:
A note of gratitude
Thank you to everyone who engaged with, shaped, and supported this work — bringing curiosity, wisdom, care, radical imagination, and joy. We are truly grateful to have been able to meet so many wonderful people through this exploration.
As ever, we honour the thinkers and practitioners whose shoulders this work stands upon. It has also been so inspiring to watch the field of collective imagination steadily growing over the past few years, and we are excited to see these ideas continue to live and breathe in various forms. We hope to continue building upon them with you outside of And Beyond, and if you have any questions, ideas, or simply want to chat, we'd love to hear from you.
As always, big love,
Amy and Will x