Isthmic Imaginaries is an exhibition, series of workshops, and international symposium that brings together artists, researchers, and communities to think from and through the isthmus. Anchored in the metaphor of the isthmus, a narrow landmass connecting two landmasses, the project reimagines Central America not only as a geographic and historical region, but as a space of in-betweenness, rupture, and possibility.

Through interdisciplinary creative practices, Isthmic Imaginaries explores how memory is embodied, transmitted, and transformed across time and place. It asks how identities are continually reconfigured through forced displacement, multiple ongoing colonialisms, and the entangled realities of living across multiple localities.

Spanning exhibition, workshops, and symposium, the project creates a space for dialogue, exchange, and co-presence, foregrounding practices that move across artistic, scholarly, and community contexts. The inclusion of multiple languages: Nawat/Náhuat, Mayan Q’anjob’al, Māori, Spanish, Spanglish, and English, reflects the project’s commitment to linguistic plurality and to ways of knowing that exceed monolingual frameworks.

Isthmic Imaginaries invites audiences to inhabit the isthmus as both a site and a method: a way of thinking across borders, holding contradictions, and imagining alternative futures grounded in memory, relation, and creative practice.

for more information and to sign up https://www.mav.org.au/powered-by/isthmicimaganiries