Ministry of Imagination
The Ministry of Imagination where we worked with the queens of Kings Island to reclaim their right to imagine alternative futures...asking whose imagination are you living in?
We were commissioned by Limerick Council and Creative Ireland to work with the community of Kings Island as part of the Creative Climate Action Decarbonising Together project. We initiated the project with a walking tour of Kings Island with Limerick Island Partners and a discussion with Limerick Youth Services. Due to the subject matter, approach and short-term nature of the project, there was a collective decision to focus the decarbonsing engagement efforts on a particular group of girls, ages between 10 to 13, from St Mary’s Park, who attend the youth services on a weekly basis.
It became apparent from initial research and engagement that the challenge of decarbonisation is less of a technical solution or an individual choice; instead, it is a class struggle colonising the future of our young people and stripping away their capacities to imagine and act. Our focus instantly shifted from decarbonising and moved towards just transition. This process was realised through workshops centred on worldbuilding, storytelling, speculation, and play. Challenging the group to flex their imagination muscles and reclaim the futures that are rightfully theirs. We posed the question 'Whose imagination are you living in? (adrienne maree brown). The answer was the co-creation of The Ministry of Imagination, founded by the participants and the first of it’s kind in Limerick. it was an experimental step beyond the limitations of the present into a preferable and just future.
The project culminated in presenting the girls with an ‘imagination kit,’ a collection of daily reminders and totems designed to nurture their creative thinking and multi-perspective engagement with the world. This kit, inspired by ideas and elements co-created during our workshops and transformed into reality, serves as a tangible reflection of their creative potential, a tangible example of how ideas become things. Additionally, we collectively crafted a ‘King’s Island Ministry of Imagination’ flag, born from the girls’ flag designs during one of the workshops, symbolising the reclamation of their imagination terrain.
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