Earlier this spring, I had the privilege of curating and leading Worldmaking as Creative Practice—a two-day invitational gathering held May 29-30, co-presented with the Creative Communities Commons at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities.
As Artist-Researcher-in-Residence, I have been enjoying this institutional home as a place to further my inquiry on collective embodied practices and their contributions to social health, relational leadership, and democracy.
This is Part One of a two-article series.
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Worldmaking as Creative Practice brought together a diverse group of 50+ artists, community organizers, scholars, researchers, funders, consultants, institutional leaders, graduate students and activists to explore how artistic practice can help reimagine systems, repair relationships, and generate more just, connected, and imaginative futures.
Conceived as a community of inquiry and practice, the event was intended to cultivate new relationships, plant seeds of deepened inquiry, and grow a shared understanding of how creative practice can be applied beyond its art-making aims. This ‘beyond’ is what I’ve referred to as ‘worldmaking’ - a word that contains questions and possibilities worth exploring in community.
We gathered over two days in the spirit of discovery—committed to exploring what artists already know, what practices already exist, and how creative process can shift the conditions under which we relate, decide, and imagine together. Thankfully, the whole thing felt less like a convening and more like an art-filled house party - a welcome vibe in these trying times.
At the start of the gathering, I offered a short provocation on the art of worldmaking to frame our time together. Rooted in discoveries from my own artistic research practice, these remarks speak to the transformative potential of art—not only as an outcome, but as a process. They reflect an ongoing inquiry I am holding about how we imagine and rehearse new ways of being in the world. I’m sharing them here as a way to carry that inquiry forward—into other spaces, and into your own reflections.
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The Art of Worldmaking
Opening Remarks offered at the Worldmaking as Creative Practice Event - May 29, 2025
By Shannon Litzenberger
Welcome. I invite you to be comfortable. Move your chair. Sit on the floor. Close your eyes. Lean on a wall. Walk around.
Let’s take one big breath together.
We are gathering in this space not just to share what we know, but to explore how we come to know—and what that means for how we co-exist in community together.
We are gathering as part of a shared field of perception. We are sensing bodies—transmitting, receiving, attuning and participating in a collective process of meaning-making.
Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers us this call:
“We need to create worlds we can’t live without, just as much as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within.”
That’s the spirit of this gathering—an invitation into imagining, creating, and remembering together. The questions I wish to invite are not “What is art for?” or even “What can art do?” but rather:
How does art allow us to imagine and rehearse the worlds we long for?
Or more precisely:
How might engaging in artistic processes help us reimagine—and remake—our relationships… to ourselves, to each other, and to the living world?
Some of you here will have heard me say this before:
Art is not just a product.
Not just an artefact or experience.
Art is also a process—a way of making sense, a way of relating, a way of knowing.
Art is a knowledge system.
It helps us feel what we can’t say.
It helps us understand beyond language, beyond logic, even beyond belief.
It is a process of energetic exchange - transmitting and receiving:
of tuning into what is present,
of sensing what is possible,
of remembering what is already known in the body.
Art as a way of knowing leans into right brain processes that understand metaphor and movement, patterns and relations.
In a blog post theatre director Anne Bogart describes worldmaking as:
“A process of engagement with infinite possibility… Through art, we experience a connection between the real and the imagined. We can imagine other worlds into existence because we know that alternative worlds are possible—and they can challenge who we are, what we do, and what we know.”
This is the heart of this gathering:
To pay attention to the worldmaking potential of artistic processes.
To hold space for the questions they surface.
To reflect on how art teaches us to relate—and in doing so, helps us become.
Similarly, Saras Sarasvathy, a scholar who explores how we shape the worlds we live in, says:”
“The moment we embrace the notion of worldmaking, we cede the notion of inevitability.”
We stop trying to predict what will happen or argue over what should happen, and instead ask:
What might happen? What else is possible? What can we make together?
In this moment of overlapping crises that forecast a future of escalating environmental degradation, social inequality, and systemic instability, this question - what else is possible? - feels to me like hope.
This shift from a past built on calculated probabilities to a future built on expanded possibility is not just philosophical—it’s actually quite practical.
But…back to the philosophical for a moment.
Worldmaking contains the word ‘world’. When we talk about “the world,” it’s easy to imagine one fixed, objective reality.
Nelson Goodman-who introduced the concept of worldmaking to philosophy and aesthetics back in the 1970’s—challenges the idea of ‘world’ in the singular. He says:
“Truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with the world. For not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous.”
The idea that there is only one world—a single, knowable, measurable reality—is a distinctly modern idea. One that has caused great harm.
Modernity, in many ways, has been a project of separation:
mind from body, self from other, humans from nature.
I attended the recent On Being Lecture hosted by the Musagetes Foundation. This year’s lecture was a conversation between scholars Vanessa Andreotti (author of Hospicing Modernity) and Nigerian Scholar Bayo Akomolafe. I traveled to Guelph to hear these scholars because of how influential they have both been in my thinking. In her remarks, Vanessa said this:
"In outgrowing modernity, the deepest challenges humanity faces today are not primarily technical or informational. They are cultural, affective, relational and deeply intergenerational. They live in how we think, how we feel, how we relate and how we carry the legacies of those who came before us. Much of the work ahead cannot be solved by knowing more or by clinging to our familiar habits of problem solving, because those habits are also part of the problem."
But we know—through art, through our bodies, through practice—that nothing exists outside its relations. Art, too, has no objective meaning outside of the relationships that hold it, shape it, and respond to it.
This is where art as a process, as a knowledge system, as a practice capable of disrupting familiar ways of relating, can help us.
The question I’m inviting here is - what happens when we look beyond art’s function in a system of cultural production—beyond its market value, its institutional approval, its visibility—and instead focus on its process?
When we create something that didn’t exist before, we are engaging in worldmaking.
And when we do it together—with care, with attention, with intention—we are not just imagining new futures, we are practicing new ways of being.
My colleague Amy Whitaker, author of Art Thinking says:
“Art is not just a reflection of the world; it is a way of shaping the world—the act of making art is, itself, a process of worldmaking.” (Whitaker, 2019, p. 42)
This speaks to the core of our gathering: that engaging in artistic processes is more than creating objects or experiences; it is an active and collective act of transforming reality.
Through art, we participate in shaping the worlds we envision—worlds rooted in possibility, connectedness, and care. It is in this ongoing act of worldmaking that we find the power to reimagine not only what is, but what could be.
The language of worldmaking might be new to some of you here. For me, it really started to come to life when I met Diane Ragsdale in 2016 - an incredible scholar who studied beauty, and more specifically the relationship between aesthetic, ethics and economics. She understood that worldmaking is not about heroic acts of invention.
Not long before she passed away in early 2024, Diane and I co-authored a chapter for the book Democracy as Creative Practice. In an early draft we wrote a short poetic manifesto about worldmaking that didn’t quite make it to publication. But I want to share it with you now.
It went like this:
“We propose that worldmaking
Is less an act of collective, heroic universe-birthing and more a
Byproduct of culture—that is, a byproduct of our
Individual and collective, enduring ways of relating in heart-mind-body
To ourselves and each other
To the natural, spiritual, and built worlds
To the past, present, and future.
We propose that worldmaking
Is a reclamation of ways of knowing, being and doing
That have been lost to us
Our ability to thrive in relationship
To ourselves
To each other
To the natural, spiritual, and built worlds
To the past, present, and future
That is already present within us
Our capacity for collective thriving can be reawakened
Through the gifts of aesthetic and embodied practices
Through processes of imaginative co-creation
Where we all participate in the conditions of our belonging
In a world that naturally exists in a condition of beautiful diversity
This is the worldmaking process.”
When we talk about futures that are imagined and co-created, we are talking about healthy, participatory, pluralistic democracies.
The connection between ways of relating, ways of organizing and ways of governing is a feedback loop.
Architect and systems thinker Indy Johar said it beautifully in his recent substack post The Fragile Miracle of Deep Democracy, democracy is not simply about the governance of now, but a relational process of becoming—"a recursive loop between memory and imagination. It asks us to remember deeply, act wisely, and imagine generously.”
And so does art.
This is the worldmaking process.
This is why we’re here.
To be together.
To sense.
To relate.
To notice what is already emerging.
To remember what we carry.
To imagine other ways of being in the world—together.
Let’s take one more breath together.
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For more on the Worldmaking as Creative Practice event - stay tuned for Part Two of this two-article series. Coming soon…
Beautiful, thank you Shannon ♥
Cogently argued, Shannon: thank you. It should be shared widely.