IMAGINARIUM
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
- Albert Einstein
The Imaginarium is a giant landscape artwork in the shape of an eye.
It is currently emerging in a rural area of western Sweden in a small village called Uddebo.
The eye consist of a room and a garden. The pupil is represented by the room, an amphitheater. In the middle of the room is a well. The sky is reflected in the surface of the water. It’s 12 steps down to the source of the water.
The theater is surrounded by a garden with trees, bushes and weeds, it is the iris. As the color of the seasons shift so will the color of the iris. The circuit of the iris is 365 meters.
The goal is to create a holy place for the exploration of the unknown and unite people through imagination, passion and collaboration. It should connect us with both history, the future and knit the foundation for a community. A space to oscillate between the earth, the reality and the imagination. Between now and eternity.
To create a better society, we must first be able to imagine it.
What is imagination?
Imagination is the ability of the mind to build mental scenes, objects or events that do not exist, are not present, or have happened in the past.
Imagination makes it possible to experience a whole world inside the mind. It gives the ability to look at any situation from a different point of view, and to mentally explore the past and the future.
Creativity allows us to do something meaningful with our imagination.
Creativity relies on our ability to act upon our imagination.
Entering the Imaginarium
You have arrived in the Imaginarium for the first time. The first yellow leaves have just reached the ground. You stand at the opening and look out over the garden. The water cuts through the terrain, a path leads you inside.
You walk along the path with the water rippling by your side. The people in the area have gathered for the harvest festival and everywhere you look you see how people are helping with the harvest.
You are amazed that the garden seems to have an infinite number of rooms. Your curiosity leads you deeper. You see increasingly strange installations and the whole garden seems to breathe with the wind. You have arrived in a living and ever-changing place.
Suddenly, a large structure rises up in front of you. As if a vast room had opened up at the bottom of a well, you enter the core. The walls embrace you like the experience of entering a glade. The light filters down from the opening in the dome, the room is centered around the still water, the shiny mirror surface reflects the light and the sky.
You sit down to digest your impressions, there are other people sitting next to you in the room but you barely notice each other, each immersed in their own thoughts and fantasies.
Believe in imagination. Trust the process.
Process is art. Exploring the unknown is how we grow as humans. We are inviting people to jump into the unknown and explore their deepest dreams. Through creating workshops, events and building sessions we investigate different aspects of our imagination. Together this will form an intricate playground around a holy central room. From the sky it will look like an eye symbolising the ”new knowledge” - imagination. This is a way of learning that is hands on and invites people to share their skills and inspire each other.
The project is initiated by Radicle Collective which is a non profit organisation and a multidisciplinary collective enabling ideas to come to life through creating and inspiring radical spaces to imagine. Over the past two years we have brought international groups together in Denmark, South Africa and Iceland through building large scale artworks.
The Imaginarium is supported by Kulturbryggan.
Team / Agust Örn, Nix Davies & Julia Andersson / Radicle Collective
Location / Uddebo, Sweden
Client / Self-initiated project
Size / 2 ha
Status / 2018 - ongoing