In the summer of 1975, a revolution began that would be revisited almost fifty years later. In the wake of a series of racist attacks on Black visitors, over two thousand protestors began the process of desegregating Carson Beach in Boston—a peaceful demonstration quickly met with police brutality and violence. Boston is no stranger to discriminatory housing and zoning laws, which systematically and physically designate communities of color to neighborhoods with lower property values, less access to educational and economic opportunities, and fewer overall resources. And public spaces, like beaches, are often sites of contestation, especially when it comes to race, class, and access.
The 1975 protest left an indelible mark on Carson Beach by raising public awareness of segregation practices and creating a culture of resistance in spaces meant for play and relaxation. This summer, artists and community members returned to the site of these protests to explore the beach and what it represents as a place of rest and joy.
For two hours on August 11, 2024, visitors were invited to Carson Beach for an evening of collective dreaming and imagining through the second annual Dream Portal: Rest Activation, organized by the Department of Public Imagination (DPI), a public art project. Curated by artists Dzidzor Azaglo and Crystal Bi, who also incorporated their own work into the space, a section of the beach near the volleyball courts offered a live soundscape, public art installations, and musical performances by a group of multidisciplinary artists led by the question What if we created space for rest + dreamwork in order to honor the past + imagine generative futures?
The activation utilizes an abolitionist framework to reimagine our relationships to broader systems of oppression, like racism and capitalism, as a way of building a more sustainable relationship with each other and our archives (physical and memory-based). “Capitalism often steals our time for rest and dreamwork,” Azaglo and Bi explained via email. “If we take time to engage in imagination work, to tune into our own intuition, we can tap into expansiveness to imagine other worlds are possible.”
Azaglo and Bi met while working with Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) on the inPUBLIC festival. What began as a mutual commitment to exploring the potential of art-making in public spaces bloomed into a partnership to incorporate sound and participation-based installations in projects of spatial and aesthetic justice, or, as the curators call them, artistic interventions. This became the Department of Public Imagination. At the heart of the Dream Portal: Rest Activation, and all DPI projects, are questions about who gets to occupy public space and under what conditions.
Rest and dreamwork thus operate as ways of showing gratitude to the protestors who fought to be allowed to use the space, both physical and metaphorical practices that encourage collective liberation. Drawing inspiration from thinkers like Saidiya Hartman, who describes the archives as “a living, moving thing,” the event highlighted the imaginative work that has been done by past generations, continuing the legacy of Black protesting and visioning for freedom.
Boston-based artist Nohemi Rodriguez provided an altar draped with green and orange fabrics that displayed a stack of postcards featuring images of the 1975 protests with prompts to speak to the protest and protestors, to write thoughts, prayers, and affirmations. Bi’s installations, the life-size Dream Portal Phone Booths, represented another opportunity to contribute to an archive of voices. Shaped like actual phone booths, the walls featured brightly colored cut-outs and shapes, encouraging visitors to step inside and vocalize their dreams against the backdrop of Carson Beach. The live soundscape featured music from the Music is Healing creative collective, accompanied by Azaglo’s poetry, opposite the crowd of people on blankets reading, conversing, imagining, and dreaming. Azaglo and Bi also collaborated with dancer and educator Jenny Oliver to incorporate movement-based inquiries into the space as a way to imagine rest and movement as collaborative structures of dreaming.
Azaglo and Bi see imagination as a mode of resistance because it encourages alternative ways of dreaming and being: “Imagination is something we are building upon. We are able to imagine more and more radical worlds because of the imagination work and organizing work that people before us have done,” they explained.
A key part of collective imagination: the collective. “When we do this [work] together,” they continued, “we can gain energy to make those worlds possible.” In this space, rest is not only a respite from the demands of daily life, but also a way to access the deeper currents of creativity and imagination that drive revolutionary change. Abolition is not just about dismantling oppressive state structures, but also about re-centering community care and support. This is work that begins in rest, in the realm of imagination.
