Law has bar associations and courts. Science has academies and peer review boards. Journalism has ethics organizations and press freedom bodies.
Religion has its own constitutions, its own councils, its own canon law. Medicine has licensing boards and oaths that have been taken for centuries.
None of these institutions are perfect. Some of them have failed badly. But they exist.
They give their sectors a place to stand.
They say: we are a recognized force in this civilization, we have principles, and we have standing to act on them.
The Gap
Poets have none of that. Neither do composers, novelists, architects, choreographers, filmmakers, designers, game makers, or club musicians.
The people whose work everyone else absorbs, argues about, is moved by, and can’t imagine living without have never had a constitutional home.
Not a union. Not a grant-making body. Not a political art movement. Something different. Something that didn’t exist yet.
That absence isn’t a wound. It’s an opening.
The Moment
Every institution that now has standing started somewhere. A room. A document. A group of people who decided that what they shared was important enough to formalize.
They wrote things down. They took an oath. They built something that outlasted the moment.
That moment could be ours.
The Proposition
I’ve spent the better part of a year thinking through what this would look like, what it would require, and who it would serve. The idea is real. The need is real.
What I don’t yet know is whether enough of the right people think so too.
So I’m asking directly.
What’s being built (if it gets built) is called Res Creativa. A constitutional body of imagination for the people who build our culture.
The name comes from the Latin root shared with another word: republic. Res Publica, the public thing, the matter that belongs to everyone. Res Creativa, the creative thing, the matter of making, the republic of imagination.
A constitutional body means exactly what it sounds like: an institution built on founding principles it’s actually accountable to. Not a mission statement. Not a vibe. A document. A set of rights. An oath. A body with members and standing and a reason to exist that outlasts any single moment or leader.
That’s what could be built.
What I’m Asking
If this is a thing you want to exist, not someday, not in theory, but as something worth your small act of commitment right now, there’s a link to short form below. It asks who you are, what you create, and whether you’re in.
If the response is there, I’ll keep building. If it isn’t, I’ll know the idea belongs to the future, and I’ll hand it there gladly. Either way, the need doesn’t go away.
What happens next depends on who shows up.
Editor’s Note (2026): This essay was written during the earliest days of Res Creativa, when the project was first being imagined. It remains here as part of the organization’s founding story.
A version of this post was originally published on Substack, Mar 31, 2026
Banner image: [Detail] It’s Painful But I Can Still Do It Alone, Porto, Portugal, Photo 2015 by Sergio Miranda, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
