Utopian Acts

Over the course of this workshop held as part of the ‘utopian acts’ conference, the ubiquitous space of a university seminar room was briefly transformed. Participants were asked to read extracts from three works of feminist utopian science fiction (sf): Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’, Marge Piercy’s ‘Woman on the Edge of Time’ and Sally Miller Gearharts’ ‘The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women’. They then worked in groups to rearrange the furniture into an echo of the utopian space of the text. By inhabiting these temporary stagings of utopian space the participants disrupted existing patterns of behaviour and opened up a site for alternatives.  

This process of imaginative construction is extended into an open access paper which crosses the fields of architecture, utopian studies, drawing and performance. A series of narrative architectural drawings by the author are presented alongside commentary from the workshop participants to reflect on multiple voices and modes of interpretation which shaped these overlapping utopian acts of construction.