MAIA’s work orientation is towards liberation. As an organisation started by Black performance and movement artists, we understand that the capacity of artists is to imagine and create possibilities beyond our current paradigm. So we work with other artists, centring Black imaginations in the crafting of other potential paradigms.
“In the Black imagination, we are creators… we can invent entire worlds, universes, philosophies, ways of relating to one another. We can explore us.” — Natasha Marin
With a collaborative ecosystem, we’re creating cultural programmes that facilitate processes for reimagining the systems and structures of our world, we’re making spaces [Sites of Imagination] where we get to practice alternative possibilities and we’re sharing resources for solidarity, access and capacity building to do this work.
Black imagination and disability justice are teaching tools for how we organise. Frameworks that understand there is a radical tradition rooted in collectivism, mutual aid and shared economics as the only way for survival. In particular, frameworks that acknowledge nobody is disposable.
Oftentimes, it feels like the somatic and spiritual core of our work is in contradiction with the expectations and conditions that come with being a Company registered in England and Wales. It manifests in a disconnect between what we do with our community and what we report to HMRC, Companies House and funders, where there is no room for nuance, richness, storytelling or spirit. We want to move beyond this. We believe in accountability to our community as much as we understand the importance of due diligence. We believe in rigour as much as we believe in intuition and in organising as much as we believe in embodiment.
Can we design the dark matter of our work in a way that not only represents, but honours this? As Dark Matter Labs say, within our current system “with these norms of governing and organising, we lose accountability to the communities we set up to serve; to the planet that we rely upon to deliver it; and to the future generations that will inherit what we create.”
As we explore how an organisation embodies its values and principles actively, throughout organisation praxis, governance, accounting and policy, some questions we’re currently sitting with:
- What does an organisation’s “policy” look like when in alignment with praxis rooted in care, access and justice?
- How does an organisation that wants to be part of reimagining safety and abolishing policing reframe “policy”?
- If Black imagination presents opportunities for expansive forms of storytelling, can we become the griots for our organisational “data”?
- What does Black organisation practice look like? Can the dark matter of our work reflect this? How can our internal processes better articulate how they reflect our external work? Can we represent this in our spreadsheets, what we capture, how we evolve our understanding of metrics and impact?
With the wisdom and support of Jack Ky Tan, MAIA will undertake “An Artist Residency in Indigenous Accounting” this spring, to explore what we can learn from our ancestral teachers and how we grow our organisational praxis rooted in Black imagination.
