Our conceptual prompts were poetic in nature; ones that asked what the world would look like without well-established concepts like borders and institutions; things that are currently under fire in most arts and critical publications and media. We also considered the idea that our future(s) would require more rebuilding than dismantling.

To supplement the focus on world-building and preparing for our respective futures and futurisms, we asked four artists– Arielle Twist, Camila Salcedo, Camille Rojas, and Madeleine Scott– to create art in pairs, whatever that meant to them and their practices. They (Arielle & Camila, Maddie & Camille) also documented their processes of collaboration and making, as a way to root the finished works in a history of their own.

This original concept quickly spidered outward and inward after speaking with the artists about their ideas surrounding the framework. They had different perspectives about what it means to start over, and how productive it is to completely rebuild and reimagine without stopping to first take stock of what has occurred in the past. An obstacle became clear: What is re-imagining? What if we need to re-imagine the way we think about imagining. What does this “re” suggest for those of us that have been “re”-moved from the canon, “re”-stricted from aesthetic optimism, “re”-strained from claiming rightful “re”-cognition? In this sense, to re-imagine a future is to further other. It is to suggest there was no past, no deep and richly crafted ancestral lineage that led to this moment. It is the opposite of assertion; an acceptance of the erasure of colonial history. Following this, we no longer felt the need to hold onto the same notions of rebuilding that we first considered.

The impending doom feels real when a path to some kind of serenity begins with writing a love letter to the place you were born and calling it homeland, as if suggesting a distance from it. Realizing that some of us are lucky enough to know our homelands in a sweet way, without crying for them, while some of us think about homeland with both the “then” and “now”; and oftentimes the “now” is a fearful and contentious and uncertain place.

To rise it seems integral to root. Whether that means cultivating love, a home, or drawing on the strength and knowledge of predecessors; all of the works that were created are in a way, totally rooted in the past. This makes sense, since the healing has to come from somewhere. It’s clear that in order to build a future we need a foundation to refer back to. We cannot rebuild as if history has not lead us to where we currently situate. So we write poems, we express love, we respect the past and honour those who came before us. We even arm ourselves with our precious histories, so that we may dance wildly into the jaws of the future; confront the precarity of technology and information, the toxic force of egos, the disease of apathy.

We build on the worlds that have been constantly built on and on and on because of (past) care and (past) love and (past) survival and (past) trauma and (ongoing) healing.