#48: On Dreaming
if you can't be liberated in your own imagination then where the hell will you be?
Hi, I’m Bianca — an Artist, Professor, & Strategist in Los Angeles. This newsletter explores my art, research, and places in between. Here we try to move design beyond decoration and towards a tool for collective liberation. However you got here, I’m glad we found each other.
This Week:
🔮 Dreaming As Studio Ritual
📟 Kamala Puligandla: Near Queer Futures
🗣️ Book Me, Babe!
I teach an interdisciplinary design studio on social justice, science fiction, and speculative futures. Over 14 weeks students study social movements and useful elements of science fiction and practice applying these principles to their design work.
However, it felt wrong to invite students into a five-hour class, essentially on dreaming, without acknowledging the nightmarishness of our current realities.
On top of multiple ongoing global genocides, the design college I teach at has a reputation for campus culture that leaves students sleep-deprived, stressed, and financially strained.
For many, myself included, imagining liberated futures right now may feel impossible.
So I decided to try something new this term:
Each week I opened the first fifteen minutes of our five-hours together with an opportunity to meditate and journal about the future.
🔮 Dreaming As Studio Ritual
I offered a container for students to explore, express, and release their desires and anxieties. During our first meeting, I grounded us in the words of Anaïs Duplan, and asked: who gets to dream about the future? Why would routine and collective dreaming space be valuable?
Historically, collective dreaming has been a seed for challenging power systems. Communities who are actually leaders in futures work – queer and/or trans, Black, Indigenous, people of color, working class, immigrants, people with disabilities – are rarely recognized, especially in design spaces, for their radical reimagining. They are the ones who pushed us to imagine worlds where workers were entitled to their weekends and people with disabilities were able to participate in public life.
Despite some students having never done something like this, nearly all of them dove headfirst into our studio ritual.
This journal entry especially moved me:
📟 Kamala Puligandla: Near Queer Futures
A few weeks ago, my wonderful friend and talented author Kamala Puligandla joined us for a guest lecture. Something I love about Kamala’s writing (and honestly just her as a human in general) is that she moves us towards possibility through moments of pleasure.
My students are asked to design an object from the future that embodies a value and either upholds or challenges systems of power. So we looked at Kamala’s most recent work You Can Vibe Me On My Femmephone, as a piece of values-driven design fiction. Her novella centers around three friends in near-future Los Angeles who are trying to improve themselves using a phone with a feminist operating system - a “femmephone.”
Kamala talked students through her own processes of writing and worldbuilding.
She began and ended our time with lots of questions:
How do we love eachother right now?
How could we love each other better?
Can we not give more tragedy to people who have already experienced tragedy ?
Is the tendency to imagine futures where we struggle under oppressive regimes intentional or just automatic?
Pretend like some “failed” movements worked out, what would they look like today?
What conflicts still exist when you give people in the future a chance to be happy?
One of my favorite things Kamala shared is that, “some big ideas and big changes begin in the mundane private and daily routines of people. Show what those small moments connected to big changes look like.”
🗣️ Book Me, Babe!
I’m here to talk to you - your design studio, school, organization, art collective, social club, etc - on all things speculative design, futures, creative direction, digital campaigns, and social movements. Reach out and let’s make it happen.
🎨 April is Arab Heritage Month & May is also AANHPI Heritage Month - so don’t forget to plug me into your programming now 🎨
I know how hard dreaming about the future can be when you’re focused on surviving the present.
For a long time, I didn’t even believe I would make it to thirty. Living with CPTSD has meant that sometimes it’s hard to imagine a future because my body can be so neurologically connected to moments in my past.
I like to think it’s not an accident that I’m here now, teaching younger people how to develop their dreaming paths towards their own intentional futures. It’s what little me needed, and tbh big me still really needs.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t conflicting feelings of difficulty, fear, guilt, and hope in attempting a more rigorous dreaming practice at this moment.
I can’t help but think of Samah Jabr’s 2019 interview. The chair of the mental health unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health explained that for Palestinians the, “clinical definitions of post-traumatic stress disorder do not apply… there is no ‘post’ because the trauma is repetitive and ongoing and continuous.”
In his book Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon, one of our most influential anti-colonial theorists, states that the colonizer does not recognize the humanity of the colonized. In response to this, Fanon proposes an inverse reality that he calls “the real leap [of] introducing invention into existence.” Fanon writes, “that I will initiate my cycle of freedom.”
As I finish writing this to you all on Eid, I see our communities, my people, and specifically Palestinians, recreating themselves, often without any other choice, to initiate their own cycles of freedom.
I appreciate you being here and I hope we create more chances to collectively dream together this year.
Eid Mubarak 🌙
Bianca
p.s. I can’t wait to share about Eteng Ettah’s class visit and my student’s final projects! If you’re not already subscribed, make sure you do that now. If you can, consider becoming a paid subscriber and support my work.
QUICK LINKS
💭 Anaïs Duplan
📚 Kamala Puligandla
🎨 Addis Barge
✍🏼 I pulled a lot of this week’s letter from here
🪧 How The Weekend Was Won
♿ Disability Visability: ADA
🇵🇸 PTSD is a western concept
💌 I’m too often sitting with the thread of conflict and chaos that was put into great question by Kamala: “What conflicts still exist when you give people in the future a chance to be happy?”
& the lack of a “post” for a lot of peoples trauma / struggle on this planet & the un-usefulness of that language/lens -> what do we use instead ? love the addition Fanon’s invention and initiation as a follow-up/response of sorts