Imagining Decolonial Futures: Collective Speculations Beyond Catastrophe

Who can imagine the future—and who has the power, space, and support to do so? This panel invites artists and designers whose work envisions decolonial futures while creating frameworks for collective imagination. Grounded in Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ approach to coloniality and decoloniality as a matrix of power shaped by colonization/decolonization, and building on T.J. Demos’ assertion that we must work with the past to understand its nuances, the panel explores how visual and speculative practices open dialogues to futures beyond capitalism. Rather than leaning toward dystopia or catastrophe, the panelists contemplate alternate realities and/or speculative futures rooted in everyday experience. Their projects challenge institutionalized narratives, reclaim historical aesthetics, and reintroduce them into collective imagination as frameworks for envisioning liberation. This panel highlights work that combines unexpected themes with mundane ones to provoke new questions. Referencing José Esteban Muñoz’s call to imagine the “not-yet-conscious,” the panel asks: What happens when our collective imagination becomes exposed to thousands of visuals portraying diverse decolonial futures? How can imagination serve as a process for unlearning dominant systems and nurturing alternatives? By centering imagination as both method and outcome, this panel considers what new answers and visual languages might emerge when decoloniality is imagined not as an unreachable ideal but as a possibility embedded in the everyday.