“There’s no other choice but to deploy an art of conversation between worlds”

If you are an artist, and/or work with a particular community (this could be a community of place, or of interest or characteristic), we invite you to work with the idea and community of Utopias Bach to create your own community-based experiment.

Typically, each experiment involves an artist (or artists) who work with a group of people. It doesn’t have to be a big group (sometimes just 3 people is the perfect size to start with!), or maybe you are just wanting to work with people within the Utopias Bach community itself.

What all our community experiments share is that they are:

• experiments that explore

• ideas for the future (that may already be present)

• 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.

How it works, and the focus of your community experiment would be up to you. We particularly encourage experiments that would co-create with those who are most affected/disempowered by the state of the world, voices that are not usually heard in the ‘mainstream’, helping to create new and radical imaginings for the future (avoiding, for example, some of the dangers of classic ‘utopian’ thinking). Read more about our values and questions here.

Because we are exploring ideas with our experiments, we are often not sure how - or if - they’ll work. So often experiments start in a small way, like a ‘seed’, seeing if they might want to emerge into a more fully grown plant. The more experimental the better! We don’t think about success and failure, but just about learning. It maybe that your experiment would start out with individuals working up or trying out ideas together, and perhaps how to turn them into some kind of creative output.

The resulting Utopias Bach might range from gardens on a plate or bonsai forests (thinking Sitopias!) to tiny poems and books or texts and samplers; 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, installations, mini-actions and events or even just observation/exchange as experimental microcosms of places, relationships, systems of the future.

It maybe that you as a community would like to bring the results together in some way, perhaps discussing the ideas behind each one, or creating an (online or physical) installation. And perhaps some of the ideas might translate into a small scale physical experiment in the real world.

How we might support you

If there is anything we can do to support you let us know! The first thing to do is to bring your idea to the Utopias Bach Collaboratory. You can do this by emailing us and letting us know you have an idea you’d like to discuss with us. We will discuss your idea with you, and together work out if it fits. If so, we could help you develop your idea, find people who’d like to support you, put you in touch with others, or provide you with a page on this website for example.

In order that you feel part of Utopias Bach, and to engage with our learning community, you are asked to join our ‘Collaboratory’, a shared space, meeting every month (once on zoom, once in the ‘real world’, usually in North Wales) to share ideas, inspirations, challenges. We ask that you attend at least one before you put forward your community experiment.

Have a look around the Co-Creating Change webite for inspiration around the sort of work, and ways of working and building commumity we are hoping to explore.

Until the end of July 2022, were offer upto £500 seed funding to support the development of new ‘plantlet’ ideas - see here. THIS FUNDING HAS NOW COME TO AN END.