Department of Civil Imagination

DCI is an experiment that has been imagined by its creators during the "Reshape get-togethers" (workshops around the topic of arts and citizenship) over the periode of two years. DCI is a fictional department that utilises the ‘civil imagination’ as a radical act to reshape realities in poetic, practical, and political ways. It is a fiction that sometimes presents itself in the ‘real’ world. It is a possible blueprint, a fantasy, a tool, an umbrella, a fire, a space without walls, a haven, a call to action, a pirate ship, a garden, a rumour, a lake, a gift. The Department currently has ‘branches’ in Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, and the UK, active across the arts, migrant activism, global municipalism, radical pedagogy, and cultural re-organisation and is a manifestation of the RESHAPE Network.

To state what is obvious to all of us, at this moment more than ever, there is an urgent need to develop our capacity to discover an otherwise possible together; to purposefully disrupt; to eagerly reach out beyond our comfortable ghettos and make friends with strangers; to forcefully resist returning to ‘normal’; to creatively forge peculiar solutions and unexpected alternatives; and to see what could be but is not yet. The accelerating international sweep of Covid-19, alongside a host of other toxic pre-existing global crises, has taught us that the improbable is now possible. But how do we learn to make the wishful probable possible?

The DCI is a collective and collaborative act. It is not owned by anyone. Instead it is on offer to you as a free and open space for deviance, play, care and re-imagination. In response to Covid-19 and its aftershocks, DCI can be a frame to share and expand as a playful reclaiming of civil and cultural power and a possibility to reimagine our shared futures.