By Emily Withnall

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the power of imagination. It’s incredible to me that humans can create something tangible from a dream. Although many of us have access to infrastructure like roads and indoor plumbing—to name two basic ones—these things we take for granted were brought into being by imagination. Our imaginations have created nearly everything around us, from paintings and forms of dance to technologies and new forms of collaboration.

While much of art and technology is judged by its market value, I invite readers to consider two older, enduring motivations for creation: necessity and expression. In this issue of El Palacio, readers will find abundant inspiration from the myriad ways personal and political histories can spark a creative response that deepens our understanding of the past and encourages us to think outside the box when imagining the future.

When telephone lines were installed across Apartheid South Africa, Zulu weavers began to use coated telephone wire to create new art forms.The innovation that came from the expansion of telephones led to a burgeoning craft that continues forty years later. iNgqikithi yokuPhica/Weaving Meanings: Telephone Art from South Africa, on view at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, features this art along with stories of the weavers and the cultural meaning imbued in their work.

For Tiffany Sánchez, a New Mexican farmer who lives with disability, access to adaptive equipment helps her continue to ride and work with horses. Sánchez is one of many farmers across the country who can continue to pursue their passions and maintain their livelihoods due to the innovations that provide greater access and mobility. AgrAbility, an exhibition at the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum, showcases stories of farmers and ranchers who have benefited from assistive technology.

Whether reckoning with personal or historical trauma, interrogating contemporary dilemmas, or creating new worlds and futures, science fiction integrates reality with imagined possibility. Contributor Timotéo Montoya invites readers to consider the pragmatic idealism offered by the artistic movement of Indigenous Futurisms in a piece about the Sci Fi & Sci Fact: New Worlds Collide exhibition at the New Mexico Space History Museum in Alamogordo. Oceanographer and author Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache) is one Indigenous Futurisms writer who weaves an understanding of the past with an expansive view of possible futures through her science fiction.

For Nikki Nojima Louis, who watched the FBI handcuff her father, Santa Fe loomed large in her imagination. Her father’s imprisonment at the Santa Fe Internment Camp shaped her relationship with him. At seventy, she came to New Mexico to learn about her father’s experiences. Learning that the Japanese American men in the camp grew eggplants was one of many entry points for Louis as she researched family stories so integral to national history. Louis’s plays and documentaries are an act of creativity that weave personal and political and serve as a bridge between past and present.

Curator Candice Hopkins and composer Raven Chacon have also harnessed the power of imagination in their life partnership and artistic collaborations. Their collaborative score, Dispatch, models the disruption of established roles and offers a vision for the possibilities inherent to community resistance and resilience. They have found that deep listening makes these acts of radical imagination possible.

In response, I offer my own invitation: When you read about the power of innovation and creativity in the pages of El Palacio, what are you moved to imagine into being? I hope you’ll share it with us.