“Radical imagination: tools of politic transformation through design”

CHAPTER 1: “5 MAPS- 5 THEORIES OF IMAGINATION”

It is a collection of MAPS, architectural and landscape PROJECTS, and WRITINGS going deep in the role of imagination in order to renovate continuously our pre-conceptions and behaviours about society and environment, looking for an evolution in which each of us is able to understand the ecosystem, to respect it and to develop a more tuned society in relation with it. Relationships in between us and our environments and the politics of space involved within, are in continuous (r)evolution in order to be re-invented following the adjustments required by our dynamic reality and people desires… taking into account tactics, processes along time, collective learning and the enlargement of the panorama of what is possible in between others.

We understand imagination here, not as kind of fantasy in order to escape or to create a parallel reality better than this one, but as a cognitive tool and as the more powerful capability in order to think that our world can be different and we can act to achieve it. An environment in which individual capabilities and lines of development can find support in the collective project and vice versa.

The first stage of this research through design, drawing and writing, is to understand better IMAGINATION.

It is for this reason that we develop the following maps about “5 THEORIES OF IMAGINATION”. We select five authors and we follow their inquiries about imagination in chronological order. It should be noted that these theories are framed within Western culture and that all of them are based on the body and its movement. We also relate these theories to specific architectural or artistic practices that embody them. The cross‑section of the selected authors (each of them studied through a different map) is as follows:

Poetic imagination- Gaston Bachelard (40’s) / María Zambrano (40’s) // Architecture: Dimitris Pikionis; Dance and scenography: Martha Graham and Isamu Noguchi.

Inventive imagination- Gilbert Simondon (60’s)// Architecture: Lina Bo Bardi; Landscape and urbanism: Lawrence Halprin; Dance: Anna Halprin.

Imagination and perceptive cycle- Ulrich Neisser (70’s) // Art and pedagogy: Hugo Kükelhaus; Architecture: Ugo La Pietra

Embodied imagination- Mark Johnson (80’s) // Landscape: S.Th. Sorensen; Architecture: Buckminster Fuller

Motor imagery, neuroimagination, politic imagination – Shaun Gallagher (2005) / Susan Kozel (2007) / Erin Manning (2009) // Architecture: Katherine Ramchand; Architecture: Diller & Scofidio.

At the roots of this approach what is present is a deep critic of the pragmatic way of thinking about what is life for, understanding that production and economical growing is the only aspect to be considered above everything else. We claim here for a kind of “imaginary pragmatism” in which this sentence by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1991) could be real:

“One aim of a radical democracy project should be to preserve one’s own power for “radical imagination”, which means the capability for utopia, for thinking the Other.” 

We follow the ideas of utopia as method developed by Ruth Levitas (2013); the everyday continuous revolutions using imagination as transformative tool (instead of crisis) supported by Roberto Mangabeira Ungers (2009); and the ideas about radical imagination developed by Cornelius Castoriadis (1975).

Within the agenda of this work are included the projects and experiences of the POP-UP SOMATIC ARCHITECTURE, also interconnected with the learning laboratory of Somatics for Architecture and Landscape, that we develop since 2016.

The development of these ideas is published in the book ESPACIO SOMÁTICO. CUERPOS MÚLTIPLES (2019)

*Additional note: If you like these approaches maybe you would enjoy also reading the definitions made by worldwide multidisciplinary people about “imaginary pragmatics” here.