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I'm Jocelyn K. Gly, and this is Hurry Slowly. Today, I'm in conversation with Amara Spence.

I come from this long lineage of people who know how to make things out of nothing

every day. If that's not radical imagination, I don't know what is.

And this is the truth. This is the lived experience

of my whole community, of working class people,

of queer people, of people having to create their own every day, you know, having

been disinvested and having been unloved, having been uncared for or untending to, and we call it survival.

So we're like, how do we combine this idea that there are people who are creating from nothing

cannot be invested in,

but are creating so much value in the world. What would they do if they could have their

material needs met? What would they do if they had their access needs met? What would

they build? What would they birth in the world if they had the license and the space and the

community and all of the things, right, to dream and create things beyond survival.

Amara Spence is an artist, an organizer, a spatial practitioner, and a designer for social justice movements.

She is the co-founder of Maya, an arts and social justice organization that's based in the West Midlands,

UK, that is committed to investing in the transformative power of black imagination.

She is also the co-creator of the Yard Art House, an experiment in building a self-sustaining,

community-owned space that supports local artists and invests in radical imagination.

She is also the co-creator of Abuelos, an artist-led hotel and cultural hub that Maya is currently

...