One Million Leaders Photo Exhibit 2022
NELIS (Next Leaders’ Initiative for Sustainability) and its flagship project, OML (One Million Leaders), are thrilled to invite the world to participate in the first OML Photo Exhibit “Counter-imagining the dystopia.
This first photo exhibit was launched in an autumnal Tokyo (Oct 26th, 2022), first at FlaGinza Gallery in the Ginza area and after this, we decided to create this virtual exhibit.
The OML Photo Exhibit – 2022, which is paving the way toward the NELIS Arts4Sustainability Fest, aims to:
- Showcase the diversity of stories and angles we can capture through a camera lens when we dare to counter-imagine the dystopia;
- Financially support the OML Programs running worldwide (OMLA -Africa-; OMLATAM -Latinamerica-; OMLAS -Asia-; OML-MENA -the Middle East & North Africa-), and;
- Support local doers, dreamers, and their communities or initiatives working towards “one world in harmony.”
Through the different NELIS projects, the NELIS members and staff work to create a platform for connection and change, a source of hope and inspiration, and an enabler force of empowerment and communication.
Through this phygital exhibit, we want to bring together local2global realities of active resistance that challenge our social, cultural, economic, environmental, and imagination crises and open thresholds to foresee the shape of what can become possible.
We want to trigger our abilities to envision other possible worlds and facilitate cross-pollination between diverse local realities through the nakedness of photography. This is why we won’t only be sharing voices and visions in-between territories but also directly supporting the funding of such processes.
It’s all about collecting the visions of earthlings from all walks of life willing to contribute and partner up to reshape our present and future!
Artworks/photos are available to purchase. The income will be shared in a balance of 50% Photographer ~ 50% Nelis/OML (remember, this is a fund-raising photo exhibit). We will primarily use the NELIS/OML percentage to finance One Million Leaders (OML) fellowship programs.
THE SPIRIT BEHIND
If we want to transform our collective path and inherit our descendants a livable world, we’ve got to envision it first. We’ve got to overcome our imagination crisis at the core of the interconnected crises we face today.
As the people from Films for Action put it, we’ve got to imagine ten thousand localized versions of this livable world. “That’s how things change. Fortunately, visions of a more beautiful, compassionate, regenerative future already exist. But since they’re not being broadcast daily on the evening news, we’ve got to dedicate a little more energy towards broadcasting them ourselves.”
The first OML Photo Exhibit wants to showcase these other possible worlds. We believe that imagining and shaping our future shouldn’t be the luxury of those with the time to do so. We are confident that those busy facing their local challenges and seeking solutions for the pressing urges of their communities usually have a profound imagination and can co-inspire us all.
Imagining is not always about hope, The Funambulist writes when speaking about futurism: “(…) visions are not wishful thinking or dreamy fables about the possibility of ‘better’ futures. They are instead a manifestation of tactical optimism; a constructivist envisioning that gives itself the means to exist through its very own formulation.”
How can we dismantle the multiple dystopias that shape our present narratives? Imagination is an unstoppable force of nature, and we are also nature, so let’s reclaim the weapon of our imagination because, as Puerto Rican poet Martin Espada (2016) wrote, “no change for the good ever happens without it being imagined first.”
