A 2-day CAPIm intensive course with students from HDK-Valand and Kungl Konsthögskolan.
The course is held in English. Note! You receive no ECTS credits for this course.
Date & location: 4-5 March 2027, in Gothenburg, HDK-Valand
Today, it is often said that the political imagination is in crisis. ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ is an often repeated adage attributed to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Zizek. This crisis is associated with a negativity towards utopian thinking, which is treated as impossible, unreasonable, or even dangerously fantastical. In this three-day workshop, we do not simply dismiss these issues, but also move beyond them, exploring the potential of utopian thinking through embodied, performative practice. We centre a mode of practice known as ‘the prefigurative’, an approach of increasing significance in contemporary socially engaged art, which emphasises the political and ethical urgency of rehearsing desirable futures in the present moment. Through reading, discussion, collective world-building, and performative exercises, participants will work together to devise and perform utopian situations, developing both their artistic practice and their political imagination.
Participants will:
- Examine the historical and material conditions that delimit utopian thinking.
- Discuss theoretical constructs of utopia and the prefigurative.
- Review cases of utopian thinking in contemporary art and science-fiction.
- Collectively work together to imagine utopian worlds, collaborating across disagreement.
- Learn fundamental skills in performance, movement, and devised theatre.
- Integrate skills and methods from their own practice, and across a range of disciplines, into a prefigurative framework.
- Work collaboratively to devise, stylise, and perform utopian scenes.
Application
Please submit a short, 200-word statement about your practice in relationship to utopian thinking before 1st of February 2027 to michele.masucci@kkh.se.
