An Imaginarium is a space devoted to fostering, stimulating, and cultivating the imagination and creativity.
Imagination is one of the most underused yet urgently needed capacities for seeing beyond the immediate and innovating amid the ongoing, systemic, and interconnected crises affecting both people and the living landscapes we depend on. Beyond preparing us for the next disruption and advancing the restoration and regeneration of our planet home, the growing emphasis on ‘futures literacy’ invites us to harness imagination in ways that help us face uncertainty with confidence and strengthen our ability to adapt.
Our Bioregional Imaginarium is imagination grounded in place—a fusion of creativity, ecology, and community visioning for a specific landscape – the Tay Bioregion. Its purpose is to help people reconnect with the living world around them, strengthen local resilience, and foster visions of sustainable, place-based futures.
“come aa ye at hame wi freedom“, a portrait of the great Scots poet, Hamish Henderson, by Martin McGuinness, made in 2019 in Glenshee to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, photo Clare Cooper
It is a cultural engine for re-inhabitation, giving communities in Tayside the tools and creative spaces to practice this concept in real time. Coined by early bioregional thinkers (like Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann), re-inhabitation means learning to live-in-place in ways that are sustainable, reciprocal, and aligned with the ecological and cultural realities of a bioregion. It’s not just “living” in a place but becoming native to it again through practices of care, restoration, and the rekindling of belonging. It cultivates the imagination, skills, and relationships needed to transform “residing in a place” into “living as part of a place.”
Arts, culture and heritage are at the heart of a Bioregional Imaginarium. They bring people together, challenge the status quo and create spaces for new ideas and opportunities to flourish and through the curator-ship of our Makar, Jim Mackintosh, we’re starting off the work of the Imaginarium with some specially curated and commissioned writing and poetry from some of the Tay Bioregion’s most powerful cultural voices. Scroll through the posts in this section of the website to read their work.
Here is Jim’s introduction to them:
” It was one of the greatest lyrical poets of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke who wrote:
“Here is the time for what can be said – here it’s home.
So speak out and bear witness! More than ever, things that we might experience are falling away, are being elbowed aside and replaced by acts without images.
Acts beneath encrustations that burst easily the moment the innards seek out new boundaries for themselves.
Between the hammers
beats our heart, as the tongue
is still between our teeth
and still it can give praise.”
Rilke – Ninth Elegy of the Duino Elegies
As human beings, we all have the innate ability to understand our sense of place – the emotional attachment, and distinct character we associate with a particular location, shaping our perceptions and the emotional connection of belonging. It broadens out to our embrace of the personal and communal bonds we develop over time – those relationships we build with a place, and the sensory, emotional, and cultural experiences that make it feel special or familiar.
As writers and poets, we have the added responsibility and privilege to translate those principles into a meaningful and inspiring way of expressing our shared values and by doing so have the power to reach others beyond our invisible boundaries and to share our messages of hope.
As Makar of Bioregioning Tayside, I have the privilege of being able to invite other writers and poets who have similar bonds with our special landscape and all its elements of culture, language and history, and to share their crafted words through our pages and as Rilke put it ‘to speak out and bear witness!’
I am delighted that James Robertson, Morag Anderson, John Glenday, Karen Macfarlane and Jennie Turnbull accepted my first invitation to contribute. Their words are beautiful, powerful, inspiring and very much speak to the heart of our new adventure.
As we build our pages, I will invite more writers and poets to contribute (and perhaps add some of my own words). The creative catchment area of Bioregioning Tayside is a kist of riches and I’d like to use our pages to provide a point for you to explore further and to learn of so many of not just the fine writers and poets but all of the amazing artists, musicians – indeed, everyone who champions our beautiful places through creative processes.
We have a responsibility to future generations. We have work to do …
“and these things which live by passing away, acknowledge your praise of them as they finish they look to us to deliver them, we, the most fleeting of all. They long for us to change them, utterly, in our invisible hearts – oh, endlessly to be within us – whoever at last we may be.”
Rilke – Ninth Elegy / Duino Elegies
