Artist Voices: Reflections from the Department of Public Imagination

In the Artists Voices series, NEFA connects with grantees to learn more about the impact of the grant on their work. crystal bi and Dzidzor Azaglo received a Public Art for Spatial Justice grant in 2023 for the Department of Public Imagination- a public art project that creates space for community in Boston to participate in imagination work and connect with others around shared dreams for the future.

Public Art for Spatial Justice aims to support public artmaking that helps us see, feel, experience and imagine spatial justice now, while we are still on this journey towards realizing more just futures for our public spaces and public culture.

The Department of Public Imagination prototypes new infrastructure for imagination work in Boston through installation, performance, and social practice art. Too often our communities are reshaped by top-down design by developers or city officials. ​For us, increasing a sense of spatial justice means creating spaces full of possibilities, where our communities can rest and dream of new worlds.

The Department of Public Imagination is an invitation to choreograph the movements of engaging with both the past, present, and the future --how the past has used beaches as a site of public right, churches as a space of worship, community gardens as a nutritious hope, or playgrounds as an opportunity to dream. The invitation is to look at the landscape of our communities and what we have shaped in the midst of systems, red-lining, and food deserts.

In creating these spaces, we have done research into the archives and brought them into our events to honor the people who have imagined us here and who have shaped our neighborhoods.

Rest and Dream Activation at Carson Beach  

In 2024, we piloted our first annual Rest and Dream Activation at Carson Beach to honor the vision and struggle of the protestors of 1975. This Rest and Dream Activation included a live soundscape performed by Dzidzor and local musicians; the installation of the Dream Portal Phone Booth, a colorful plexiglass sculpture where community members call in to leave and listen to voice messages with their dreams for the future of their neighborhood; an altar with ways to engage with archival materials and write messages of gratitude to the protestors from 1975; a floating installation; and an invitation with blankets and pillows for more than 50 people to rest. 

Cristela Guerra of WBUR’s Artery honored us with ​​her reflection of this Activation event: “Our purpose there was clear: to take up space, to honor the past, to acknowledge what it took to simply be in these bodies and lie on this beach. To realize that decades ago, this experience is what those protestors manifested through their peaceful resistance.” 

Through our work at Carson Beach, we have connected and collected interviews with past protestors and share excerpts from these interviews on an interactive landline phone that people could pick up and listen to at the 2025 Rest and Dream Activation event. People mentioned how impactful it was to hear this interview and view the archival images and understand that they were standing in the same place as the 1975 protests. People also came up to us and mentioned their own connection to the protests, their family members who lived nearby or participated. This collective remembering and imagining are forms of spatial justice across times.  

While Boston has evolved and the beach has become a welcoming space to gather, we choose to remember the past, to honor the ways the 1975 protestor's imagination and efforts helped to shape a more equitable public space for all. 

Continuing the Work of Horizontal Imagination 

The Department of Public Imagination has expanded our own pedagogy around imagination as a tool for engaging with the archives and a guide to dreaming toward a collective future. It continues to serve as a collective practice that invites the general public to honor the past, as a way to engage with the future building and guiding for the present.  

S​​ince our initial activation at Carson Beach, the Dream Portal Phone Booth has continued to engage various communities at the Embrace Boston Festival held at MassArt, ​ds4si’s​​ Rearranging the Neighborhood to Reimagine the City summer series at Mary Hannon Park, the Multicultural Festival​ at Mary Hannon Park,​ ​and the 75th anniversary at ​Freedom House, among other public spaces.

Additionally, we have held workshops on how horizontal imagination has shaped the landscape of our communities, practices in collective imagination, and community archiving as an imagination practice. These workshops were held in community with youth from Freedom House and at Design Studio for Social Intervention. These workshops have helped us connect our in-public installation and activations with the practical work of horizontal imagination with folks in Boston. 

And this past summer, the Department of Public Imagination held its first extended residency in Design Studio for Social Intervention’s storefront space to imagine what a city department of public imagination would look like in Boston. By setting up a scene and interactive environment, we invited people to engage in imagination and memory work. The ‘dream portal’ phone booth with audible community dreams, 3D models of dreams, Department of Public Imagination “workers” in uniform, archives of community imagination through history, are intentionally placed as an interruption - a glitch - to disrupt the everyday responsibilities and hold open space for dreaming.  

In our two-week residency, we engaged nearly 300 people, collected 127 community dreams for the future, and held a series of programming (workshops, jam sessions, and panel conversations) to engage folks in conversations around imagination throughout history. Our aim was to create spaces where community members and their dreams can take up space. We had multiple folks cry, embrace one another, and tell us how meaningful it was to have a space to share their dream. Each dream felt like a celebration and that felt really successful to us.  

The Public Art for Spatial Justice grant gave us two years of support to take what was just a small seed of an idea and let it grow through many iterations. In the beginning, we had a clear concept, but the grant allowed us to try rough drafts, to see what worked and what didn’t, and to let each attempt guide the next. Every version shaped how we chose to present, how we designed the experience, and how we dreamed forward.  The process of testing, shifting, and refining became the foundation of the way we work together, and it’s what continues to carry us into the current iteration of the Department of Public Imagination.   

Our advice for future PASJ applicants: Follow the route of your curiosity, anger, and inquiry. Your visions are connected to a deep well of imagination and activist work. Look for collaborators across generations, deep in history, to enrich your practice and feel connected to a long lineage of creators and dreamers.