Department of Civil Imagination

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.

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. 

Please enter the DCI, but be aware that this is an open building site so please wear hard hats, look out for loose cables, bits of equipment and tools and rubble lying around, and temporary walls or curtains; there may be trip hazards. Please occupy the lobby, build new rooms, hack the hallways, take it away and make it yours to:

• start a movement working towards transforming, not merely postponing, business as usual across Europe and actually transforming the post-crisis cultural sector;
• create a free and accessible development space to collectively reimagine, skill-up, prototype, distil and share learnings;
• exercise our imagination as a political tool, to shape and share our interconnected problems and interconnected solutions;
• take any or all of what is here and experiment with it;
• create your own rooms responding to whatever urgencies you’re living with.

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.