Utopia School

Utopia School is a month-long social center* hosted at Flux Factory for the purpose of studying Utopian experiments throughout time, as well as practicing our skills towards building new free spaces and practices. These classes, screenings, discussions and games will be connected by the essential question: What kinds of information are useful for re-imaging the future?

To us, utopias take the form of intentional communities, squats, community gardens, communes, and other initiatives geared towards communizing resources, (including those which don’t self-describe as Utopian.) We hope these classes and explorations will help to document and further these specific knowledges.

There will be several Utopians-in-Residence as well as class leaders involved in running the space at any given time, co-learning together, and teaching classes. You, too, can propose a residency project which interacts with the space. We hope you will join us!

Utopia School is open from 12pm-10pm Wednesday-Sunday, from October 1-31st on location at Flux Factory, except when otherwise noted. There are a bunch of field trips in the works, and some classes will take place at other venues, so pay attention to the location in “class descriptions”.And, finally, it is never too late to propose classes. Please visit utopiaschool.org to propose a class. See you in the classroom!*Social centers (or social centres) are community spaces. [EXPAND Read more.]They are buildings which are used for a range of disparate activities, which can be linked only by being not-for-profit. They might be organizing centers for local activities or they might provide support networks for minority groups such as prisoners and refugees. Often they provide a base for initiatives such as cafes, free shops, public computer labs, graffiti murals, legal collectives and free housing for travellers. The services are determined by both the needs of the community in which the social center is based and the skills which the participants have to offer. Social centers tend to be in large buildings and thus can host activist meetings, concerts, bookshops, dance performances and art exhibitions. Social centers are common in many European cities, sometimes in squats, sometimes in rented buildings. Also known as a free space, social centers may be designated “safe-space” where specific forms of dialogue and activism are encouraged and protected from harassment, or they may be intended to serve as open space for community interaction among widely disparate groups without censorship. There is a great deal of overlap between the two types.[/EXPAND]

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