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Dear friends, old and new,

Every year or two I like to go on a small sabbatical to recalibrate things, but in 2023 I had a particular moment of crisis. I don't use the word "crisis" negatively. It's just in 2023 I had this strong feeling that something needed to change. I felt every cell in my body tell me that I wasn't just bored or feeling uncreative, but that I needed to morph and turn into something else. Maybe not something else entirely, but I sensed that I was changing anyway, or being revealed. I was sick of not being who I was meant to be. Whatever that meant, it was a puzzle that brought me to a few places. First to Paris to study with Gueorgui Pinkhassov, to New York where I had the chance to exhibit some of my work, to London to learn more about the fine art photography scene (and realizing that wasn't quite my thing), then to a small grey port town in Japan where I stumbled upon a little library that finally provided me with a small piece of the puzzle, and an expanded picture of my new life gradually came into view.

One month into my year-long sabbatical in Japan, I abandoned my plans and started a community library in Singapore, and from there a few shifts happened. I was changed, as promised by the universe and my lovely astrologer (shoutout to Rux who told me I might have a "big change of identity" in mid 2024). I became more than a photographer. But I think it's more than just my identity that has changed, but how I experience this world.

For thirteen years my chosen work was advertising and commercial photography. It allowed me to succeed on my own terms, which were quite simple, nothing too crazy - make good money, do something I enjoy and am good at, not have to get a 9-5 job, be free to dictate my own schedule. But time passed and one day I realized I’d outgrown everything. I don’t mean photography, but the way I did photography, and the way I worked and operated in this world. I felt a strong urge to climb out of my comfortable but narrow well, which constricted my view of the world, and transform myself - to kind of dissolve and melt into new shapes… in order to to meet the world, instead of hide away from it.

I was disconnected from the world, I think, for a very long time. Then came the library. With the library, my place in the world has become more entangled. I have become an accidental community-builder and part of a community, and with rootedness comes unanticipated joy. Some days I find myself sitting in the library smiling at everything that's happened, even the difficult moments, feeling grateful at being entangled with it all.

I think I've been saved by a library - gifted things and people I didn’t know I needed, learned things I didn’t know needed learning. How on earth does a small library (only 450 square feet) drag up questions around purpose and meaning and self worth and happiness? I don't know, life can be so strange. All I know is, whatever it might be, we must strive against all odds to find answers to the puzzling questions that keep us awake at night. And sometimes an unlikely path, say a small library, might take us there.

Magic and fire

My whole life I've been a fan of doing random projects, driven by seemingly random bursts of curiosity and passion (or maybe just a lethal combo of being an Aquarius + self-diagnosed ADHDer). I've made a magazine, a traveler's backpack, a cafe, a radio show, a library. There are constantly so many things in my head that begin as a small spark, that I'd like to make real in this world. I'd go so far as to say that doing random projects is a wonderful way of being alive, because of that spark. That fire. We can't live in this world dulled and flattened by the bureaucracy and idiocy of things. We need to be reminded that being alive is a special, special, wondrous thing, and that we're full of awesome powers because we can all make things, and having access to this creative energy and capacity is a birthright of ours.

This new website is my new home on the internet. It's a place for me to play freely, to save words I've written about my ideas and what I am currently working on, a place for me to think about photography and creativity and our place in this world and a few things in between, a living room for like-minded friends - or even unlike-minded ones - to gather. I guess this website is community-building too, an exercise in making friends. Thanks to the internet, I can write this in Singapore and can reach people everywhere in this world. It's like magic.

It's magic and fire we need.

Reflecting on the state of the world and where we have found ourselves, I find myself returning to the position that hope is not only important, it's what's gonna ultimately save us. Hope, I've written elsewhere, is not stupid or meaningless. Hope is, in the end, the fire that will sustain us into a more beautiful future, the kind we actually want to live in.

There is a name for such an approach - imagination activism. I like the sound of it. When I say it, it feels light and regenerative. After we built the library and I had to reflect on my experience, I used "light and regenerative" to describe the power the library has given us. It is the opposite of the heavy and destructive blows often dealt by power as traditionally conceived and hoarded by people who want to control this world. Without knowing it, we had built the library on the principles of imagination activism, which is the act of dreaming of a world we'd be thrilled to be a part of - a world more equitable and open and less fragmented - and actually coming together to build it.

Rob Hopkins is one of the lead practitioners of imagination activism. He goes around the world giving talks, where he describes the time machine he has built and the trips he takes on them. He travels often to 2030 - a time that is neither an utopia or a dystopia, but a 2030 that resulted from us doing "absolutely everything we possibly could" to change the world for the better.

In this future, he often finds himself in a neighbourhood where plants and trees line the walkways, and bicycles swamp around him during rush hour. And all the car park spaces are empty! He finds himself in underground carparks where mushrooms are grown for food and medicine and as replacement for leather. He visits a school designed by kids, who choose to build a rainforest in the middle of their school. He visits areas where beavers "work" as natural engineers to restore biodiversity to the land. He visits cities who have "civic imagination offices" and people can come together to be imaginative about the future.

At the end of the talk he reveals that there is no time machine, of course, and these are not imaginary places of the future, but actual places in The Netherlands, in Belgium, in Amsterdam, in Switzerland, in Spain where these practices are already happening. The future is already here in some places. It is possible to do these things! We just need to distribute the imagination and the courage on a wider scale.

Looking at Rob's work, I realise I want to be an imagination activist. Or maybe I already am one.

Will you join me?

Colophon

I worked with two of my favorite creative minds for this website - Elliott Cost, who did the coding and design, and Ryan Ben Lee, who illustrated and animated the header banner. It's always always a joy to work with smart and talented human beings like Elliott and Ryan, to have their magic be a part of something I get to put out into the world.

- R