How do we imagine and create, from the worlds we inhabit, those we would like to inhabit? Crises, the end of the world, dystopias, impasses, and dangers: if the scales, temporalities and words and images that bear witness to them are shifting, then the forms and places of what must cease, be resolved, be transformed or changed are multiple and interrelated. From the colonial and racial violence that has been perfected since the middle of the 15th century to the contemporary antifeminist and transphobic backlash; from working conditions to successive housing crises; from population surveillance to algorithmic warfare; in sum, these urgencies are as punctual as they are enduring, as past as they are present, as local as they are global.
This is what the various scholarly, artistic and militant critical approaches rooted in anti-capitalist, feminist, queer, anti-racist, decolonial and/or anti-fascist approaches are engaged in documenting and exposing. Beyond analysis, the worlds we inhabit are the plural spaces of worlds to be made, for planning, innovation, transformation and improvisation of the possible. In short, these spaces reflect the myriad of utopias, their conceptualizations and their materialities.
With this in mind, arts and culture have the potential to play a leading role. While this is not to suggest that they are necessarily emancipatory or even at odds with the status quo, arts and culture might, in fact, be a privileged place to escape ‘legitimate’ forms of representation and projection.
Between representing the present as well as the past, and imagining and creating what is not (yet), art and culture has the potential to resist, mobilize, undo, remake, propose and attempt. What is the material being imagined and created by artists? What has been and can be, and how can we avoid censoring it? What forms, practices, methods and materials can be mobilized to imagine and create other possibilities? And what can imagination and creation potentially identify as pitfalls, failures, paths to rehabilitate, or perhaps how to continue the status quo? Secondly, what does the topos of utopia allow or prevent, and how does it interact with different conceptions of transformative imagination and creation? Finally, how do artists invest in what is not (yet) and, in turn, feed critical and social thought in a time of urgency?
This international conference will take place on November 6, 7, and 8, 2025, at four venues in the Ottawa-Gatineau region: the Mauril-Bélanger Social Innovation Workshop (Saint Paul University), the SAW Gallery, AXENÉO7, and L’espace DEP Sylvestre.
Locations :
November 6th : Atelier d’innovation sociale Mauril Bélanger, 95 rue Clegg, Ottawa
November 7th : SAW Gallery, 67 Nicholas Street, Ottawa
Novembre 8th AM : L’espace DEP Sylvestre, 230 rue Montcalm, Gatineau
Novembre 8th PM : AXENEO7, 80 rue Hanson, Gatineau
