On a rare rainy day in Barcelona, I decided that visiting an exhibition about Mars was the right thing to do. I was standing between a video installation of the sky on Mars and a series of comics — called Amazing Stories — about Martian realities, when I read this phrase: “Imagination always finds a way of scaling the walls imposed by every genre or discipline.”
Human beings require imagination for healing and creativity just as much as we need it to achieve social justice. Imagined realities act as expanding experiences in oppressive systems. During the Cold War, Martian realities became extremely popular in cinema and comics, one of the reasons was to explore Otherness and escape from the very real and perpetual fear that was characteristic of that time.
Speaking of imagination, this month I travelled with it to Brooklyn NY, where Ilana Harris-Babou welcomed me in her beautiful studio, turned Art Corner for the occasion. Harris-Babou is an artist and educator from Brooklyn who creates imagined realities through video, installations, and sculpture to question paradigms. Read the full piece here.
