The Utopia*Art*Politics Collection

“What happens when we reckon with our often painful history, and draw on the wisdom and traditional knowledge of those who have been excluded in order to reimagine utopias beyond our current apocalyptic trajectory?”
– Felipe Viveros, 2025

The Utopia*Art*Politics Collection brings together diverse ideas on how artistic practices can help reimagine and remake our world. The concept of utopia has a dark colonial past that lives on through overgrown dreams that leave little space for other possible futures. This collection explores the alternative potential of utopia—not as an elite blueprint of predefined ends—but as a radically collective method for justice. It includes provocations and insights by 33 artist-researcher-practitioners who participated in the Utopia*Art*Politics Sessions, held July 3-5, 2024 in Utrecht, hosted by the Urban Futures Studio, Community Portal @ BAK—basis voor actuele kunst, and Stichting Moira. Below you will find a link to the multi-media collection, followed by my introduction to the collection.

— by Josie Chambers

We live in deeply troublesome and uncertain times. It feels harder than ever to imagine a future that is both collectively desirable and achievable. Mainstream politics have only served to deepen this crisis of imagination, exacerbating marginalisation, polarisation, and apathy. Now trapped between a populist pull towards romanticised ‘utopian’ pasts and technocratic push towards envisioned ‘utopian’ futures, the time is ripe to revitalise our utopian imagination and politics.

We organised the Utopia*Art*Politics Sessions to collectively explore the potential of utopia as a creative and plural method for justice. This was in response to growing concerns over efforts to imagine positive, better futures, amid utopia’s long-standing colonial and elitist past. Radical imagination has often been rendered too 'safe'—privileged ideas dreamt up within the confines of fiction, workshops or one-off interventions, yet unmoored from cultural and material movements for justice that truly matter. At the same time, radical imagination has become deeply unsafe—wholly unaccountable to the political consequences of whose imagination claims space, and the tendency of imagined alternatives to become overgrown, suffocating the breath of other possible worlds.

During July 3-5, 2024, the Utopia*Art*Politics Sessions brought together 33 artist-researcher-practitioners who actively experiment with how artistic practices can help reimagine and remake our world. The event was co-organised by the Urban Futures Studio at Utrecht University and Community Portal @ BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, with hosting support of Stichting Moira. Together, we sought to push the boundaries of our intertwined imaginative, artistic and political practices. Artistic practices involving storytelling, visual art, theatre, music, and more can play a powerful role in our imagination of possible futures and reinterpretation of past and present moments. Such practices can make visible what has been silenced; disrupt our ‘common sense’; traverse conflicting imaginaries; offer glimpses of a world otherwise; compost and repurpose deep cultural undercurrents; and compel people towards shared action.

Radical imagination has often been rendered too 'safe'—privileged ideas dreamt up within the confines of fiction, workshops or one-off interventions...

To orient our conversations in the Utopia*Art*Politics Sessions, we each created a provocation that explores what we see as the most radical potential at the intersection of utopia, art, and politics. Contributions ranged from experimentally grounded to profoundly speculative; from written form to artefacts, collage, music and more. Several provocations were enlivened at Dreaming in the Dark, a performance evening which used striking stories, visuals, and music, to provoke ideas around how artistic practices can help people imagine more radically together. Keynote provocations by Lola Olufemi and Stephen Duncombe deepened reflections on the purpose and politics of imagination.

Three common threads emerged from the initial set of provocations, which oriented our explorations across the three days.
 

• Utopias Between Us attends to the diverse conceptualizations of what utopia is and does in the world, from its darkest proclivity to supplant social places with 'no places', to its most radical possibilities as a method for justice. It explores how we might navigate with grace the many hidden, odd, overlapping, contradictory utopias that co-exist, especially amid the rise of fascism worldwide.
   
• Ambiguous Deep Utopias foregrounds the need for new societal spaces that enable people to sit with complex feelings—grief, rage, care, mystery—that are often short-circuited in modern society. Contributions explore the radical possibilities of what such spaces might look like, enact and enliven.
   
• Proof in Utopias explores the fundamental question—so what? Can artistic experience lead to actual change in the world? And how would we know? Through a tour of diverse approaches to prefigurative politics, we gain a sense for how utopian ideas can become a powerful force when made possible in the present, without sacrificing their radical ambitions.

Amid the growing encroachment of fascist politics on democratic spaces for radical imagination and solidarities for justice, we need more than ever to explore the potentialities that exist at the intersection of utopia, art and politics. This collection offers several entry points situated between theory and practice. Even as the Utopia*Art*Politics Sessions kicked off last July, our institutional host BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, had just received news of their defunding from the municipality of Utrecht. This is an organisation which over 25 years has become a leading international platform and locally beloved space for bringing together art, theory and social action to imagine otherwise, especially privileging the most precarious classes in society. It is urgent to find ways to protect and expand these cultural and political spaces for alternative thought and expression.

Rather than close this collection with conclusions, we choose to share openings—ideas emerging from the three days which we hope can enliven imagination around what is possible between utopia, art and politics. Artefacts from the Otherwise are a set of playful artefacts we dreamt up and created on the final day in response to our desire to share experiences, tips, ideas, and resources on how to enact utopias in practice. The task was simple—to imagine an artefact, which, if it came from another time and place, might inspire and orient our society towards moving radically together otherwise. The aim was to not duplicate an artefact that we could have each created before entering the sessions, but rather make something that builds directly on our exchanges.

This collection closes with the piece:

Composed by Noor Noor (electronic music and bass) and myself (vocals), it reflects our desire to make space for processing the various provocations and emergences in the Utopia*Art*Politics Sessions in a language that goes beyond words—towards that which cannot yet be uttered, but might be felt, imagined. Ironically, we had to give the piece a title in the end (‘WeTopia’) to add it to Spotify and SoundCloud. However, the original (and our preferred) title is a simple red squiggle—echoing the squiggle that often appears under words branded as errors by software. Of course, it is those words at the margins—even people's names—that are typically deemed weird or wrong by this squiggle. Yet 'utopia' is no longer one of those words at the margins, having become so commonplace—perhaps even too normal. Must utopia then be re-made strange, unrecognisable, unknowable, to experiment with its most radical potential? We leave the radical potential of utopia up to your imagination, but hope it will be nourished by the many individual and shared contributions in this collection.

For a more collective expression of the diverse feelings and sense of mystery that underpin the work of our collective of utopian artist-researcher-practitioners, listen to the shared playlist composed by all of us, compiled by Joost Vervoort. Rather than stay asleep alone amongst the colonial ruins of utopia, we invite you to dream radically together otherwise.

Utopian Pulses is a blog series in which Josie Chambers shares creative approaches for collectively imagining the world otherwise. From challenging seemingly inevitable unjust futures to facilitating alternative forms of politics, each month, Utopian Pulses invites you into new ways of enabling our collective imagination to flourish.