John Carney
As creatives, what is our responsibility to rethink social models and share strategies for change, and how does this impact our relationship with the political?
John Carney reimagines the world under a new banner – ‘All Power to the Imagination’. Translated from ‘L’imagination au Pouvoir’, the saying is one of the key slogans of the Paris Student Revolt of 1968. The historic uprising invited individuals to dream collectively, and imagine new social and political models, underpinning the powerful potential in collective utopian thinking to ignite social change. However, false utopias have also been monopolised in populist political strategies through promises of a mythical return to an imaginary idealised past, as seen in the propaganda of right-wing populism across Europe and the United States.
The flag acted as a conceptual starting point to open up questions about the paradoxical nature of utopias in a talk he recently delivered as part of UTOPIA. The talk is available to view below and invites thinking about the power of the imagination to craft new models of looking at the world and creating individual social agency, as well as its potential to be hijacked as a tool for popular control.
This talk was delivered via Zoom on August 14th 2020.
