Photo credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty for Somerset House

Long before John Lennon sang “You may say that I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one” Thomas More was dreaming of a better world, 500 years before in fact. 2016 marks the quincentenary of Thomas More’s optimistic classic Utopia. To celebrate, four seasons of events, exhibitions and new commissions are being programmed under the banner UTOPIA 2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility.

A collaboration between Somerset House, King’s College London and the Courtauld Insitute it’s as expansive an endeavour as More’s weighty tome. The brainchild of 'Artist Advisers' Ruth Potts and Gareth Evans the festival couldn’t come at a better time. “Reviving the idea of utopian dreaming also felt timely and important. With the multiple, and increasingly urgent challenges facing us socially and ecologically, we need to create spaces in which we can imagine how we might organise the world differently,” they say. “We’re surrounded by negative versions of the future, but we need space for positive visions, too, otherwise a dark future becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We wanted to create an inspiring space where people could come together, see that the world could be different, and be inspired to make change happen.”

The programme features the worlds of fashion, science, fine art, design, literature and philosophy. From the smiley face of Jeremy Deller and Fraser Muggeridge’s Utopian Flag (pictured above) in the skies, to Fashion Utopias, or the day-long event TEDxCourtauldInstitute: Breaking the Rules, and an art exhibition celebrating street art - it’s as expansive as More’s imaginary world. For Potts and Evans it was vital that the ethos of the festival matched More’s. “It’s been hugely important for us that the way that we have worked on UTOPIA 2016 follows not just the spirit, but the practice, of Utopia.”

“From new collaborations between academics at King’s College London and artists; to projects with the British Library who are displaying a first edition of the text; to the British Council who are helping to bring a global perspective to the programme. The spirit of collective endeavour has been central to the project.”

But what does it take to make a dream of a better future a reality and will there be any Beatles sing-a-longs? Run Riot sat down with them to find out. “If the way things are at the moment is the best we can do, we’re giving up on humanity. We have to be able to do better” they conclude. We couldn’t agree with them more.

Honour Bayes: In an art world full of florid self-important titles, ‘artistic advisor’ is a pleasingly straightforward one! What does an artistic advisor do?

Ruth Potts and Gareth Evans: More than anything, the role of artistic advisor is to see the bigger picture, draw together the threads and ensure that the year has a range of tone and colour. In the spirit of Utopia, the project has been hugely collaborative from the start: we’ve nudged, guided, shaped and we hope, supported – working alongside a host of fantastic people from Somerset House, King’s College London, the Courtauld Institute and beyond to make UTOPIA 2016 happen. We first took the idea to Jonathan Reekie (Director) at Somerset House, who expanded our initial proposal for a festival to cover a whole year of activity, and brought King’s and the Courtauld on board. We’ve spoken to a range of artists and creatives about the project, as well as partners and each of them has left a trace. With each collaboration, the shape of UTOPIA 2016 has shifted again. We’ve been working with a living, evolving concept right from the start, which has been hugely exciting!

Honour: The festival seems curated across themes found in More’s book, like playfulness and community. What other themes are there and can audiences use them as a guide throughout the year?

Ruth and Gareth: The spirit of UTOPIA 2016 is very much rooted in the exciting things that can happen when groups of people come together to make things happen. We’re interested in unusual and unexpected juxtaposition, and surprise encounters. You’re right, play and community has influenced the project enormously. And, as More’s Utopia described life on a fictitious island there are a host of themes to play with. In More’s Utopia everyone wore the same, simple clothes, but the Fashion International Showcase has taken its cue from the idea that fashion encourages us to see ‘wishful images in the mirror’, celebrating cultural diversity and creativity. The summer’s Counterculture Now installation, which will wrap itself around the building to celebrate the utopian impulse of 'now': the way in which we are constantly challenging the status quo and shaping the world anew. With the challenges we currently face collectively, creating a space of possibility feels hugely important, and celebrating the alternatives that are emerging all around us, if we choose to see them. Paths to Utopia at King's in the summer will showcase a range of utopian experiments between academics and artists from the notion of discord, to an Anarchist Night School and the hauntingly utopian figure of the whale. The Utopia Treasury allows us explore some of the themes explored in the book in more depth, from property ownership to governance, education, housing and the relationship between the city and the country: we’re inviting people from all walks of life to explore what imagining differently might mean now, and what we might do to make change happen.

Honour: In our cynical world the idea of believing in one where we’re good to one another is sometimes seen as Hallmark and mawkish. But UTOPIA 2016 seems mischievous and cool. Was sentimentality something that you deliberately fought against?

Ruth and Gareth: At the dawn of 2016 - with wars raging around the world, an ongoing and unresolved refugee crisis, terrorism, fears of a new global economic crisis, growing inequality and social tension – it's easy to dismiss the notion of Utopia as fanciful. The present smothers our imagination and realism dismisses our dreams. Yet troubled times are exactly when we are most in need of utopian dreamers, practical alternatives and new ideas. Anthropologist Judy Thorne conducted an experiment in a shopping centre in Nottingham where she asked people about their hopes for the future. In the most unlikely of places, peoples’ hopes were hugely positive: that society might be more equal, or we’d abolish money. It’s easy to be pessimistic and takes guts to have hope. We hope that UTOPIA 2016 creates a space where positive visions for the future are nurtured and encouraged, and people are inspired to experiment.

Honour: Arts role is often seen as a provocative one – to encourage people to question. UTOPIA 2016 puts forward that it can also inspire them to imagine a better world. How do some of the pieces in the festival do this?

Ruth and Gareth: The beauty of a year of activity means that there is space, and time, for a really wide range of content and style. What we hope is that different elements of the programme do that in different ways. Out There: Our Post-War Public Art revisits an era when government invested in art in the public realm, recognising the way it inspires and lifts our collective gaze to the horizon. Running alongside this, Venturing Beyond, by A(by)P, explores unsanctioned public art – graffiti – as an intrinsically utopian practice. It’s that juxtaposition of official and unsanctioned that intrigues, challenges and opens up new space. In March, at the Courtauld, the artist Alex Hartley, will discuss, Nowhereisland, his ten-year artwork that culminated in a new travelling nation built from an Arctic island that he discovered in 2004. Nowhereisland gathered more than 23,000 citizens during its journey from the High Arctic to the South West coast of the UK: Alex didn’t just imagine Utopia, he created a whole new world. Katie Paterson’s hauntingly beautiful work, A Mirrorball reflecting every solar eclipse from earth, encompasses the tiny and the vast, the infinite and the particular, encouraging us to re-examine the relationship between humankind and the cosmos. It bends time, connecting us not only across space, but through time, uniting us in a collective experience. It removes us instantly and completely from the mundanities of everyday life, giving us the space to reconcieve the world and our place in it. It takes our gaze as far as it can go, to the furthest reaches of space, encouraging us to see the Earth as it is, an Island. That disconnection and re-conception is at the heart of Utopia.

Honour: What does a better future look like for you and has your dream changed through the making of UTOPIA 2016?

Ruth and Gareth: Dreams, like utopia, are always changing, that’s their point. Some things are consistent, of course: the world can and must be more equal; we have to deal with the challenge of a changing climate and create the space in which people are free to follow their dreams. Through the making of UTOPIA 2016, we’ve become more and more convinced that diversity matters, and have been inspired by human potential. Without a range of visions, techniques and art forms we can’t create the space in which dreams can really take root. We can’t wait to see how the year unfolds!

UTOPTA 2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility
now, and through out 2016
Somerset House, King’s College London, Courtauld Institute
utopia.somersethouse.org.uk
#Utopia2016