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Utopia Lab: Seats at the Table
15th November 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM GMT
This workshop takes place over 14th & 15th November. Please note – we require that attendees are present for the entirety of both days of this event.
Our Utopia Labs are ‘no-spaces’, places where everyone is welcome to join us in dreaming futures that inspire our experience of the present.
The term utopia was coined from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island society in the Atlantic Ocean.
The word comes from Greek: οὐ (“not”) and τόποσ (“place”) and means “no-place”, and strictly describes any non-existent society ‘described in considerable detail’.[i]
In this session, Dr Jimmy Turner and Francesca Vale will present their visions of a utopia in which everyone has an equal but individual seat at the table. On our own and in groups, we will respond to these visions by designing and creating chairs that offer comfort and community to people of all descriptions and abilities. The chairs we produce will then be the starting point for a curatorial exploration in which we consider how the chairs interact with one another and what they represent for the world or worlds they inhabit. We will consider what Utopia means and how it could be a useful crucible in which to explore positive change.
Day 1: Sharing and Making
Day 2: Curating and Contemplating
Lunch and materials for creating will be provided. The lab will also include meditation, poetry reading/listening and simple movement and breathing exercises. All body types and levels of experience welcome.
Please note – we require that attendees are present for the entirety of both days of this event.
Utopia is a ‘no-space’ for contemplation, innovation and collaboration. Our labs curate interactions between academics, artists, entrepreneurs, students and audiences in person and online globally. We are interested in that which is provocative and irreverent as well as that which is nurturing and joyful. Utopia questions are catalysts for inquiry, learning and creativity. With an emphasis on innovative and experimental ways of communicating, we will explore meditation, dialogue and co-creation with the help of a facilitator. Participants consist of University staff and students, and non-University practitioners.
Website: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/utopialab/utopia-lab-2023/
Biographies
Jimmy Turner is a Research Fellow for the Binks Hub at the University of Edinburgh with a background in anthropology and gender studies. Their woodworking practice started as a hobby in 2018, and has since developed into an artistic and curational practice which frequently merges into the ethnographic and social research contexts in which they work. This has recently seen Jimmy work with colleagues from the EFI and local community to make the ‘Spirit Case’ sculpture which lives on the third floor of Edinburgh Futures Institute, collaborate with the Ripple Project in NE Edinburgh on a community-led arts/research project, and collaborate artistically with colleagues from Edinburgh, Newcastle and Kings College London on the AHRC ‘Fail again, fail better’ project, which explores utopia and failure.
Frankie Vale is a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow. She is currently halfway through her doctoral project, which uses a blended scholarly and practice-based approach to consider the representation of breast cancer surgery in art and curation. Currently she is co-curating the Empowered Journeys project with people who have had breast cancer surgery to produce artworks and pieces of text based on their lived experience. These artworks will go into an exhibition that will consider representation and investigate how curation and creativity can challenge the narratives that society projects onto post-surgery bodies. Previously she undertook a Masters by Research in Collections and Curating Practices, in which she co-curated the Art in Mind exhibition, an exploration of art and mindfulness, and completed her dissertation on the rarely-acknowledged collaborative processes of queer surrealist photographers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
About the Utopia Lab Team
Jennifer Williams is the Creative Projects Manager at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She manages a portfolio of creative projects that connect the work of the Institute to communities within the University of Edinburgh and beyond its walls. Utopia Lab, for instance, is a project in which people from many different places gather to dream futures that inspire our experience of the present and allow us to see the world in new ways that enable change.
Jennifer is a poet and librettist and her background is in writing, art, collaboration, creative learning and project management. Williams is particularly interested in expanding dialogues across languages, perspectives and cultures and in poetry, cross-form work, music, visual art, dance, opera and theatre. She is concerned with the body, and how slowing down can help busy people to experience their connection to themselves, one another and the world more fully.
She holds a BA degree from Wellesley College in English Literature with a Studio Art minor, and an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Recent posts have included Projects & Engagement Coordinator at the Institute for Academic Development, Programme Manager at the Scottish Poetry Library and Literature Officer at the Traverse Theatre.
See Jennifer’s website for more information about her own creative explorations.
Dr Matjaz Vidmar is one of the first utopians, joining the pilot project in 2019. He is excited about philosophical, processual and political implications of utopian thinking, but actually enjoys the off-grid, poetry-infused meditative vibe of our labs the most. Matjaz is also an academic in Engineering Management, where he is researching innovation processes, R&D (eco)systems and futures strategies and design, especially within the space industry, artificial intelligence and data-driven economy. He leads interdisciplinary projects spanning arts, science and civil society, he is involved in several start-up companies; and he delivers an extensive public engagement programme. More at www.blogs.ed.ac.uk/vidmar
