Almost Impossible

The zone of the almost impossible is where I’ve always most enjoyed working. It’s where interesting sparks happen, where you’re pushing at the edges of what’s already known and tested out by others, or in your own practice.

Importantly, it’s not about frustratingly untethered magical thinking - the almost impossible zone is where new connections and ideas can spark because there’s just enough oxygen of possibility flowing through to bring something to life. The tantalising sense that something is almost impossible, floating at the twinkling horizon of possible things, is what entices me onwards.

For my own creative practice, the value in doing any creative project is in its potential for expanding that bubble of possible experience and understanding into the previously impossible, however tiny the increment. It feels mischievous and alive to be tinkering with the almost impossible. I am also aware of the privileges that allow me to play in this zone safely and to enjoy the creativity of uncertainty rather than being overwhelmed by it.

Our planet and our fellow humans desperately need for more of us to be enabled to explore the almost impossible - for joyful entertainment, for the sheer wonder of being, and for our collective survival. We need new voices and minds to tell stories and to explore radical, equitable approaches to the almost impossible crises of climate, public health, and education.

How might the world be if we invited everyone to explore the almost possible horizon together?

The colonial and patriarchal systems that established the world’s museums and art galleries continue to cast long shadows over the aesthetics and grammar of the way objects and ideas are presented to audiences. In these spaces, culture, art and science are presented as tidy nouns, neatly labelled, completed Things in separate rooms. There’s an invitation of sorts, to have a personal response to these Things, but only once the ideas behind the Things have been cleaned up, defined and mediated by expertise - by the practitioners themselves, and by layers of directors, curators and interpretation writers. There’s little space left for the curiosity of audiences to expand into.

Too often, expertise is worn in cultural spaces as armour for protecting knowledge and status, both individual and institutional. Museums and galleries operating as keepers and protectors of the known, can end up holding their audiences at a fixed, comfortable, well polished distance from the messy, almost impossible edges where makers and thinkers are in motion.

The innovation spaces that nurture the hybrid work of the scientist or artist researchers who spend their time seeking, testing and creating at the almost impossible edge of things, do not often have well understood or well designed interfaces with audiences. The work usually only gets shared publicly once the expert practitioner has brought an answer back, or created an artefact of their enquiries in the almost impossible corners.

So these artefacts of the almost impossible have already been made possible by the time they are hung on a wall, put in a case or ‘explained’ in an exhibit. As audiences, we are the receivers of an end point of a process and are rarely invited in while the shimmer of almost impossibility still dances around an idea in motion.

This all reinforces a hierarchy of knowledge and who gets to generate it, or ask questions of it. There is such potential to make a difference here, if cultural institutions trust audiences enough to share art and science as verbs, as things in motion, it shifts the relationship with audiences to be on a more equal footing - to be active agents in a collective act of ‘not knowing.’

There is an urgent need for a new type of cultural space with this vital role to play in society - as equitable spaces where everyone can engage in not knowing, to explore the edge of the almost possible. These spaces might turn out to be museums and galleries or they might not have a name we all understand yet. One day, let’s hope, these spaces will need to be as salient in our society and as instantly understood as a cinema is.

For now, the invitation to not know comes from an imaginary museum, but as with any project operating at the edge of the almost impossible, the best place to start is by saying it out loud, as often as possible.

(NOTE - I read something, somewhere, recently about working in the zone of the almost impossible, which provided the language for this post. I’ve since lost the reference. If you know it, or wrote it, please email the Imaginary Museum and let me know, I would like to link and credit the original inspiration.)