About
Utopian Acts 2018 is a new one-day festival exploring utopia in activism, academia, and the arts.
This is how we envision it: on 1 September 2018 in London, a diverse group of people will come together to explore the ways in which radical political practitioners, creative workers, and academics both within and outside institutions create, use, and define utopia. We want to explore utopian acts - activities, processes, events, moments, methods, irruptions, and movements of a utopian impulse - whether or not they are intended to be utopian, because we refuse to believe that utopia is static, boring, quixotic, or dangerous. Utopia is not a blueprint, but a conversation.
The festivals' organisers are PhD students, activists, and creatives, and our main goal in creating this event is to collapse, disturb, and make porous the boundaries between the avowedly abstract work of academia and the apparently concrete work of activism and art. Our festival will therefore consist of a living and feral mix of some or all of the following things:
- Academic paper presentations
- Workshops
- Joint panels of those who identify as academics, those who identify as artists, and those who identify as activists
- Live music of the radical persuasion
- Zines
- Presentations by activists and artists of their work and activities
- A poetry slam
- Interviews
- Exhibited art
- Things we haven't thought of yet, and which we are waiting for you to suggest.
The conversations that this day will amplify are already being held, must be louder in this decade more than ever, and will reverberate, we hope, into an increasingly utopian future.