Imperfect Utopias

In 2023, the ‘Beyond Opposition’ research project developed three artist-led creative workshops across Ireland, Canada, and Scotland. These workshops brought together people who disagree in relation to gender, sexuality, and abortion. Participants collaborated in the cities of Dublin, Vancouver and Glasgow, working with differing mediums (visual art, music and sound, and theatre arts) to explore what it might look like to imagine a world where we live together, knowing we may never agree.

From these workshops, an online exhibition titled Imperfect Utopias was developed through a collaboration of researchers, visual artists and designers. As a visitor to Imperfect Utopias, you can experience what it might be like to join these workshops, and imagine what an ‘imperfect utopia’ might look like to you.

Join us for a launch of the Imperfect Utopias website. The event features a short roundtable conversation between researchers and artists involved in the designing of the workshops and website, including musician Gillian Stone who led the Vancouver music and sound workshop. The discussion will be followed by interactive opportunities to explore the different facets of the website, as well as take part in immersive art and sound-based activities.

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca

Gillian Stone

Gillian Stone is a multi-instrumentalist, interdisciplinary artist, music researcher, and Vancouver Island transplant based in Toronto (T’karonto). Her vocally-driven solo project, which draws from post-rock, folk, ambient, and avant sonic landscapes, explores intersections between mental health, trauma processing, and destigmatization. Working with experimental e-cellist Michael Peter Olsen (Zoon, The Hidden Cameras), Stone co-produced singles “Bridges” (2020), “Shelf” (2021), and her November 2022 debut EP, Spirit Photographs. She is now building her forthcoming album, Oddný, an exercise in chronicling the remarkable stories of her Icelandic-Canadian foremothers and crafting an interdependent salve to heal intergenerational, ancestral wounds of shared gender and blood, through ethnography, poetry, memoir, and inter-genre soundscape creation.

Organized by Imogen Flower and Katie Young

Funding for this project was provided by the European Research Council.

Project name: Beyond Opposition. Funding Number: 817897.

https://erc.europa.eu/homepage