A space to unravel; to heal; to play; to dream; to move.
And Beyond began as a participatory research practice in 2019, under the stewardship of Will Bull and Amy Foster-Taylor, exploring the question: how can we co-create a more conscious, connected future?
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Whilst recognising the importance of the imagination in shaping change, early in our work, through different projects, in different forms, we kept encountering barriers to it. 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 and its impact across different communities and on our conception of possibility. We soon recognised that it was not simply about envisioning new futures, but rather about expanding our capacity to hold a new future within ourselves — about confronting the past and rewriting our relationship with the present.
Deep transformative change is not simply about envisioning new futures, but about expanding our capacity to hold new futures within ourselves.
And Beyond continues to be a fluid collaboration of research and practice, supporting the emergence of more just and equitable futures through:
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Deepening 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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Interrogating 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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Nurturing the spaces, conditions, practices, rituals, and conversations 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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Exploring, designing, and supporting the development of the structures and systems that honour our social and ecological entanglement; creating and sustaining cultures of wholeness and communities of care.