Dreaming Together: The Future Depends On It!!

Twenty-three innovators from corresponding fields of practice – including art, education, philosophy, curating, public health, journalism, the church, museology, theatre, music, and anthropology – speculate about the benefit of thinking and acting together, as opposed to alone, in the contemporary moment.

The resulting collection of texts overflows with fresh ideas and personal perspectives. Many chapters conjoin subjects that we’re not used to thinking of as allied to reveal that in combination they can amount to something greater than the sum of their individual parts: artist and gallerist, nature and mankind, heaven and earth, art and life, to name a few. Others take a more direct line to argue that our very future depends on developing more inclusive and collective responses to worldwide crises, as they progressively occur.

In both free and mixed market economies we have gradually come to inhabit cultures that promote self-centred individualism and uncompromising autonomy as a means to gain material wealth and therefore, apparently, happiness. And yet, for so many reasons, almost everyone seems to feel either alienated or marginalized nowadays. In dialogue with these proliferating social, political and cultural shifts ‘Together’ pursues the need to surmount the manifestations of silence, ignorance and discomfort that have come to accompany life lived alone among others. By looking outwards from the artworld this anthology succeeds in opening up a range of possibilities for engendering principles of civic imagination, tolerance and solidarity alongside the need for self-care.