MAIA is a Black-led cultural organisation, engaging radical imagination for liberation.
MAIA envisions a world towards liberation, in which artists are resourced and mobilised to reimagine its possibilities.
We engage culture as an imagination and organising strategy, working to build infrastructures that grow the personal, structural and sustained capacities in support of thriving Black life and its interdependencies.
As an organisation that rejects a single-issue struggle analysis, we identify the complex just-transition of this time as a fundamentally cultural transition. So we create experiments, tools, prototypes and rehearsal rooms that help us move towards liberation, across three intersecting mission strands:
From these mission strands, we're building demonstrators that prototype possibilities of the ‘otherwise’.
Our practice is rooted in Birmingham, UK, but planetary facing, with experiments happening beyond borders.
Learn about our team, mission, values and principles here.
Sites of Imagination
We design spatial interventions for a reparative, re-pairing connection between Earth, ancestry (past and future), place and dispossessed/displaced kin. Recognising how the wealth accumulated in the UK from the commodification and extraction of earth and the enslavement of African peoples, has severed sustained access to space and ability for connection, we create place-based cultural prototypes as convening portals to rehearse the worlds we dream of, drawn from the radical precedents of "Grandad's house".
Culture for Liberation
We create experiments with artists and cultural workers as the designers, practitioners, storytellers and world-builders for liberation. Our cultural programmes and residencies draw upon Black scholarship and community practice to explore the role of art(ists) in growing public consciousness, designing alternative systems, mobilising for embodied change and rehearsing freedom for liberatory transition.
We must build a cultural power eco-
system—in other words, a form of cultu-
ral power that reflects the future we wish
to see. This cultural power ecosystem is
interdependent, regenerative, life affir-
ming, and nourishing. It has the capacity
to influence culture and shift economic
and political realities. It eschews power
structures of domination, competition, and extraction while generating the resilience that is required to navigate a systemic transition.
— Aisha Shillingford
Resourcing the Movement
We affirm the dignity and possibility of our kin, growing the personal, structural and sustained capacities of Black artists, cultural workers and the communities they’re embedded in, to shape change. Depedestaling money as the primary source of value, we invite exchanges of other values, testament to the expansiveness of us. We do this by supporting each other’s needs, from financial, creative, access, spiritual, knowledges, ecological or otherwise.
“The moment we begin to dream of justice, of liberation, of right relationship, we become imagination warriors. Organizers. Our mission is to co-dream visions more compelling than oppression, and more honest than supremacy. And then move from imagination all the way to new practice.”
- adrienne maree brown
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