The “Can You Imagine” Water Protection Art Exhibit and Engagement is a design that intends to utilize our human capacity to envision and dream into the outcomes we wish to see, as an effective way of changemaking. The project guides the public community into invoking their own imagination and somatic anchoring of what water protection and reunion in Payahuunadü will feel and be like, understanding that if we create from a place of expectancy and wish-fulfillment, our aligned actions amplify this outcome. 

Specifically, the project aims at shifting the identity and scope of the valley’s gatekeeper of water and our cultural, community, and future experiences and relationships with water: the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). The project invites us to shift the relational range of LADWP into its future incarnation: Los Angeles Department of Water Protection, regenerating values of what the future is calling into being: from water wars to water reunion and from water & power to water protection. Essentially, the project asks that we shift the power to the relational authority of people of the land and the consciousness that we are able to cultivate within that enables “right relationship” with the sacred water and ways of these lands. And, first, we imagine that reality. This project invites just that.

The project acts, also, as a supportive gathering of like heart-minded individuals to potentially align in more community events of water artivism via collecting their imaginal responses and contact information.