Utopias Bach - network

How it works

Utopias Bach is a network of people supported by a partnership between Wanda Zyborska, Lisa Hudson, Samina Ali and Plas Bodfa and a co-creation, co-learning network ‘the Collabatory’. We are always open to conversations with artists and communities in order to develop the project as a process and a collaboration. You can see where we’ve got to here

If you are interested in helping to develop the project please join us!

The ‘artistic intent’ at the core of Utopias Bach is both one of ‘process’ (how it is done) and one of ‘content’ (what is made). It is, as a project in itself, experimenting with a Utopia Bach, learning about new ways of working for artists, communities and organisations in the challenging, uncertain, changing times we find ourselves in. Part of this is looking for ways of resourcing the activities - we hope to find funding to support the artists and the community connectors with whom they are working.

We have come to think of Utopias Bach like a strawberry plant, with the core partnership and Collabatory feeding offshoot plantlets until they are strong enough to live independently, while ‘seeding’ ideas further afield. Each aspect of the project is designed to reach further out at grassroots level, creating a project that is uniquely ambitious and open-ended, lead by and tailored to the needs of those taking part.

Each community would work with at least one artist to create their Utopias Bach project(s), and how they go about that in each community might be very different, depending on what works for them.

“Creative projects are one way to communicate and share across our borders in solidarity” - Angela Chan

The mother strawberry plant or “Collabatory” is a distributed network of learning and resources for all to use and contribute to. Perhaps we could host a series of (online/physical) events to discuss futures linked to the Utopias Bach, and to learn from the process of working together. So the process of thinking about and creating Utopias Bach as little experimental Utopias in themselves.

So the project is always in a state of becoming, each person involved shaping where it goes next.

Perhaps as it evolves, the results would be brought together in online and physical installations and experiences in different rural and urban art and non-art venues around Gwynedd [or elsewhere in Wales?], perhaps even as a Helfa Utopias Bach trail, or a Gwyl Utopias Bach festival. This might build a collective sense of empowerment, play, creativity and hope between diverse communities and individuals.

so what might utopias bach be?

“If you want to change the future, play with it first.”
- Stephanie Olsen

Those taking part in Utopias Bach would be invited and supported individually and in community to create

• experiments that explore

• ideas for the future

• constructed/presented/framed in a small scale (physically, or as a microcosm)

• that in some way might help us imagine the world a better place for humans and more-than-humans of all kinds, especially those who are most badly affected by the current state of the world.

The resulting Utopias Bach might range from gardens on a plate or bonsai forests (thinking Sitopias!) to tiny poems and books, texts; from micro conversations to online games; from puppetry and lego buildings and towns to technological innovation; from mini-monuments and Minecraft worlds to photographs, films, performances and events as experimental microcosms of places, relationships, systems of the future.

"Ychydig wridog wîn, a llyfr o gân,
A thorth wrth raid, a thithau, eneth lân,
Yn eistedd yn yr anial gyda mi - 
Gwell yw na holl frenhiniaeth y Swltan,"
(allan o gyfieithiad John Morris Jones o benillion Omar Khayyâm)

Ymuno â ni! get involved!

If you’d like to join us in developing the project, perhaps creating your own Utopia bach project in a community/combination of communities (of place, interest or characteristic), or in any other way, please get in touch/join the mailing list

background

“Within every dystopia there’s a little utopia.”
-Margaret Atwood

Please click on an image below for background to the project, including thoughts about utopias (heterotopias), miniatures, revolution and how bach comes to the rescue to the legacy of utopias and miniatures…