The image is composed by an artwork from Giovanni Ambrosio series Projects plans prints future pasts and by an AI generated picture simulating a thermographic landscape photograph

Where do we start with the practice of imagining Europe as an ecosystem?

As part of the E3UDRES2 Spring School “Imagine.Your.Europe!” from 14-19 April 2024 in Fulda, Germany, we will be working with 20 international students from all over Europe to create futuristic scenarios and further develop the Foundland Map of Altereurope, which was started last year at the Vonderau Museum, in a process of collaboration with students, pupils and citizens of Fulda in 2023.

Images, narratives, concepts, uses of language to which we have become accustomed help to define the boundary between the real and the imaginary, between fact, unrealisable dream and possibility. They become norms that are seemingly primordial and unchangeable. The challenge now is to present these frames and boundaries, which appear stable, as something that is in fact changeable.

Democratic imagination is therefore first and foremost a view of the world that is sensitised to historical changes and has the courage to question the normal. 

For example, the normal of a world that places people at the centre and only looks at nature out of utilitarian interest.

It is necessary to cultivate a gaze that can see and recognise possibilities in the midst of the given and understand the obvious only as the result of previous ideas. 

Thus, the ability to give linguistic or visible form to the possible can shift the frame of meaning and hold the promise of improving individuals’ access to democratic life.

Imaginative capacities emancipate us by enabling us to question the dogmatic force of the present, which presents itself as an unchanging reality and leaves no room for alternatives.