Editorial #2

(1) Rhian O’Sullivan

(1) Editor Radical Creativities

osullivan_2025.pdf

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Cite this publication: O'Sullivan, R. (2025). Radical Creativities - Editorial #2. In Radical Creativities (Number 2). KEA. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19667452

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Dear Reader,

What does it actually mean to transform? Everybody likes the language of change. But transformation, if it is to mean anything at all, has to survive contact with reality: institutions, publics, places, limits, contradictions, and all the messy conditions that make cultural work both urgent and frustrating.

Cultural practice offers forms through which people can test other ways of being together, of seeing the world, of inhabiting history, memory, ecology, conflict, and possibility. The following contributions bring together artists, academics, and practitioners, whose work together allows a new test site to take shape.

Kim Holflod opens the issue with a research paper on radical pedagogy, proposing four orientations for rethinking education: transversal collaborations, playful pedagogies, relational attunement, and rebellious hope. It is explicitly future-facing, framing pedagogy not as preparation for the world but as a practice of world-making in the present.

Diana Raiselis takes a more grounded approach in her piece on Queer Space Project, which she describes as "part personal narrative, part academic paper." The project ran an education programme for aspiring LGBTQ+ venue operators across Europe, and what it found was telling: structural barriers — access to capital, finding suitable space, identity-specific discrimination — ranked higher than knowledge gaps as obstacles. The closure epidemic of gay bars is real, but what Raiselis is really asking is how new queer spaces get built in the first place.

Jerneja Rebernak's essay takes its organising image from a visit to Nepal: the falcha, a carved wooden platform built by the Newari people of the Kathmandu valley as a communal space for rest and debate. From there, she thinks through what it would mean to create genuine spaces for intercultural dialogue — drawing on projects like Collecting Otherwise at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and the Asia-Europe Cultural Diplomacy Lab — and how cultural institutions might move away from colonial hierarchies and toward what she calls "pluriversal ways of knowing."

Julia Neugarten's piece is structured as an interview between two versions of herself: the fan and the researcher. She is writing a PhD on fanfiction and the split between these two positions is not merely rhetorical — they have genuinely different values, different relationships to privacy, and different ideas about what counts as legitimate knowledge. The piece is one of the clearest demonstrations in the issue of why first-person, formally experimental writing is not a stylistic choice but an epistemological one.

María Ruigómez Eraso contributes something different in form: a sound piece recorded at the WienMuseum, in which visitors respond to the question "what is the sound you associate with home?" Snowstorms, cooking oil, apartment doors, rivers, the platschern of the Donau. Twenty-three voices in German and English, from children to elders, from Austria to New York. It is an exercise in listening as method, and as curation.

Teresa Esser and Kira Koplin examine the renaming of Kunstinstituut Melly, formerly Witte de With, a Rotterdam art institution whose name honoured a Dutch naval officer central to colonial expeditions. Through interviews with the two artistic directors involved, they analyse what it actually takes to change an institution - not just its name but its board, its staffing, its programming, its relationship to community. Their framework is institutional entrepreneurship, and their conclusion is measured: transformation is possible, but it requires structural openness, time, and a willingness to acknowledge that participatory processes don't automatically translate into participatory decision-making.

Yanni Ratajczyk's philosophical paper takes direct aim at the journal's own central concept. Starting from the paradox of "dark creativity" — acts that are innovative and effective but morally abhorrent — he argues that the real problem is not how to define creativity more precisely, but philosophy's compulsion to produce unified definitions at all. His proposal is phenomenological: stay with specific, complex cases rather than abstracting away from them. The soup thrown at Van Gogh's Sunflowers is his final example. Not an answer, but a question held open.

Sara del Bene writes about wild clematis — Clematis vitalba, the invasive climbing plant that suffocates other vegetation along rural paths across Europe. Her workshops invite communities to harvest it and make objects from it: trays, containers, bird nests. What she calls "rooted art" is a practice grounded in place, seasonal rhythms, traditional craft knowledge, and the specific social dynamics of rural areas. Heritage here is not something to be preserved but something to be reactivated.

Ana Isabel Albuquerque contributes a poem, A Never-Ending Story, that moves between sound, sight, and taste — crystal, skylark, blackberry, gardenia — tracing the distance between the experiencing self and the writing self. It ends plainly: "I lie when I write, because I'm thinking about what I'm feeling. / And thinking keeps me from truly feeling."

Finally, Anna Maria Ranczakowska writes from within the network itself — or rather, from within its uncertainty. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of Nepantla, the Nahuatl word for the in-between space where identities and paradigms come into conflict, she describes a network that resists defining itself too tidily, that understands friction as a condition of real connection rather than an obstacle to it, and that is trying to practice commoning without romanticising it.

What these pieces share is less a common argument than a common honesty about difficulty. Transformation inside institutions is constrained by funding, governance, and the limits of participation. Queer space is endangered by structural forces that education alone cannot fix. Research on communities you belong to involves ethical tensions that cannot be fully resolved. Heritage is not fixed. Networks are not stable. Creativity cannot be defined once and for all. None of this is cause for despair. It is, in most of these pieces, the starting point.

Radical Creativities remains committed to creating a space where different forms of knowledge can appear without being forced into false hierarchy. Writing sits alongside image, research alongside reflection, experiment alongside analysis, and our peer review process is part of that commitment. We would like to offer a huge thank you to each of our contributors for trusting our journal with your words, and to you, dear reader, another huge thanks to you for being here. 

Welcome to Issue Two.