“The responsibility of an artist representing an oppressed people is to make the revolution irresistible.”
MAIA’s vision is a world towards liberation, in which artists are resourced and mobilised to reimagine its possibilities.
Our mission is to grow capacity for collective world-building, where Black imagination and culture are lenses to explore how we get free.
Values
As a mission-led organisation, we centre our work and relationships in four core values:
ACCESS: creating the capaciousness by meeting the varying and expansive needs of people
JUSTICE: acknowledging the interdependence of all injustice, for liberation to be possible, it requires us being in right relationship with change and all beings
CARE: Mariame Kaba teaches us that “care is the antidote to violence”, in which we understand care as a political, structural and relational practice
JOY: as a tone, a spirit, a reclamation and act of resistance in the face of compounding crises and forms of oppression
We work with other artists to challenge the systems and structures around us, co-investing with our communities to imagine and then build from liberatory paradigms.
“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is - it is to imagine what is possible”
As an experimental organisation and incubator of ideas, our work shape-shifts and manifests in lots of different ways, including artist residencies, physical spaces, design labs, Imagination Cyphers, community programmes, mutual aid practice, resource libraries, radical schools and much more. Key to this, we are always in a process of learning, iterating and adapting, on our journey towards liberation.
Principles
We ground our work and understanding of a world towards liberation through a number of connected beliefs, approaches and principles.
Black Imagination(s)
Transdisciplinary Practice
Time Travel
Disability Justice
Mutual Aid
Emergent Strategy
Regenerative Economics
More-Than-Human Accountabilities
We centre, treasure and uplift the experiences, practices and imaginations of Black artists, particularly those who are impacted by intersecting forms of oppression. All of our programmes are open to all, unless otherwise specified.