In her thesis, Olga Popova attempts to outline the limits of the imaginative faculty in overcoming states of being stuck. Interweaving personal, historical, and political narratives, she is looking at depression, rejecting the terms of failure that are often ascribed to that state. The starting point of her reflection on the role of imagination in persisting loops of entrapment is the artwork We Shall Return by Kiluanji Kia Henda. Popova concludes that the film illustrates imagination’s double bind: its promise of change can hide the complicity of imagination in the creation of conditions that it is supposed to be used against. By investigating the genealogy of imagination, she tries to trace where it implodes on itself, replicating familiar confines instead of subverting them.