Abstract for the conference Failed Again – The Fault Lines in Utopia Newcastle University – part of the Fail Again, Fail Better? Recuperating Failure in Utopian Politics and Research Project
Weaving Failure into the Utopian Fabric – Artistic Engagements within Creative Care Café Structures
This paper addressed the question: “…what if failure was intentionally built into the fabric of utopia, if ‘fault-lines’ were purposefully incorporated to promote reflection, revisions and renewal?” Expanding on the paper given at the Edinburgh event in April, this paper focuses on the use of creative methods in the Brighton (UK) based funded Creative Climate Cafes project and Menopause and Mind projects. It will offer visual case studies of these two projects which use arts within the traditional conversational care café structures. They utilise the transformative potential of creativity to incite the utopian impulse within participants in the “darkness of the lived moment”.
The initial paper at the Edinburgh Conference has set up café spaces such as this (and others that such cafes have grown from such as grief and death cafes) as spaces of anticipatory failure. In a sense these café spaces are also Microutopias (events and projects that are small, planned resistances and social experiments) which set out to embed and identify failure as part of the action and being within their spaces. There is a focus on finding ways to live with the crisis as well as finding ways to combat it. It is possible to view these café spaces as heterotopias where the normal rules operate differently. Here we are seeing human failings as a necessary and inherent part of life that we have to ‘be with’ rather than escaping or resolving our failure.
Both projects have anticipated failure in their inception, it is at the heart of their being as they have started with the faults. Given the prevalence of failure within our species being, we can see the spaces as representative of different structures of failure. The Creative Climate Cafes tackle climate crisis, a result of concurrent and collective failures under a patriarchal and capitalist system which is destroying our lived environment. The Menopause and Mind cafes tackle the failures of which menopause related mental health struggles to be adequately supported, and the medicalised construct of failure of menopause where there are persistent narratives of the failure of the body and mind and the perceived end of ‘usefulness’ of the feminised body, despite the critique of these narratives within the spaces.
In these spaces hope can be reconfigured by grief. This applies whether it is for our loss of our lived environment and each other, or for the multifaceted loss of self (socially constructed or as part of a transformational process) that can accompany menopause. These café sessions are structured so people can explore their thoughts and feelings through the artistic forms, not just discussion, bringing forth unconscious as well as conscious thoughts and feelings. Using simple and accessible creative activities such as collage, expressive painting or use of clay or inks there is an exploration and expression of feelings bringing to the surface what is hidden and allowing for world-building in the cracks of our society. Weaving failure into the fabric of the utopia, the images and artistic creations from these sessions are both hopeful and critical, allowing for expression of failure and also new hopeful structures to be emergent from the chaos.
Workshop Images (2023) – Menopause and Mind – Collage/Painting/Clay
Harriett’s Press, a community laundrette and arts space in Brighton, is redefining what it means to tackle some of society’s most pressing issues: hygiene poverty, social isolation, and mental health. In our research, Magnetic Ideals, sheds light on this innovative model and its impact. It offers insights for policymakers, social researchers, and community practitioners alike.
Hygiene poverty, characterised by a lack of access to essential cleaning products or facilities due to financial constraints, is an emerging yet often overlooked issue. The report notes that, unlike food or fuel poverty, public awareness of hygiene poverty is remarkably low. Yet, its consequences are severe, leading to social stigma, shame, exclusion, lowered self-esteem, and health problems. 4.2 million UK adults are affected, and many have to choose between basic hygiene products and other necessities, such as food or heating.
For economically disadvantaged communities, low confidence in social settings is a significant barrier to connection. Over 9 million UK adults report chronic loneliness, leading to emotional and physical distress. Harriett’s Press, situated in an area of high social deprivation in Brighton, directly addresses these interconnected challenges.
A Holistic Approach: Laundry, Art, and “Accelerated Intimacy”
What makes Harriett’s Press unique is its holistic, non-institutionalised approach. It provides free laundry services alongside a flexible arts program. This isn’t just about clean clothes; it’s about fostering a community where individuals can develop confidence and creative identity. The service caters to those experiencing financial hardship, housing precarity, mental health issues, and neurodivergence, offering a timely and necessary lifeline amidst the ongoing impacts of the cost-of-living crisis and long-COVID.
A key finding of the research is the therapeutic benefit of the 1:1 arts practice embedded within the laundrette. The non-prescriptive nature of the art engagement is crucial; art is offered, never required, allowing for playfulness, error, and experimentation without judgment. This fosters pride and identity formation, with many beginning to self-identify as artists or imaginative individuals.
The report also highlights the concept of “accelerated intimacy”. The casual setting of the laundrette dissolves formal social norms, allowing for a unique openness and camaraderie. People “air their dirty laundry” both literally and metaphorically, fostering rapid emotional connections through shared vulnerability. This intimacy is fostered through parallel activities rather than forced interactions, creating a safe space where meaningful conversation and silence can coexist.
Laundry as a Canvas for Transformation
What sets Harriett’s Press apart is its commitment to embedding art and creative practices within the everyday act of doing laundry. The distinctive 1:1 arts facilitation model employed diverges from more commonly studied group-based community arts. This personalised approach offers tailored feedback, emotional safety, and deep personal engagement, proving particularly beneficial for individuals with neurodivergence or trauma who might find group dynamics overwhelming. Harriett’s Press is more than a service; it’s a catalyst for community connection. Many service users report feeling isolated, and the laundrette provides a reason to leave the house and engage socially, leading to the formation of supportive networks.
Participants describe the service as “transformative,” citing improvements in mood and reduction in anxiety. The art-making process becomes incidentally remedial, offering wellbeing outcomes even if not explicitly planned as therapy. This reclaiming or discovery of creative identity through accessible practices disrupts conventional narratives about who can be an artist. Some have even explored other creative workshops or considered employment in creative sectors.
The report argues that arts-based interventions, such as Harriett’s Press, address complex social problems in a non-stigmatising way, suggesting that the arts should be integrated more systematically into public health and community services. The implications of this model extend to policy and practice in community arts and public health. The report argues that arts are not an “add-on” but integral to the effectiveness and appeal of such services, suggesting a need for their systematic integration into public health and community services. Harriett’s Press offers a dignified and creative approach to addressing hygiene poverty at a local level, providing a model that could inform future strategies and policy reform.
However, like many grassroots initiatives, Harriett’s Press faces challenges related to limited resources and short-term funding models that often prioritise quantifiable outcomes over qualitative depth. The report recommends adopting creative evaluation tools that captures the richness of their work, resisting reductive metrics. Organisations such as Harriett’s Press should seek long-term funding while carefully guarding against losing the intimacy and ethos that defines its service.
The study underscores the urgent need for government policy and statistics to address hygiene poverty. Encouraging broader academic and community collaboration is vital to evaluate the long-term impacts of community laundrettes. Furthermore, creative methods should be employed to elevate hygiene poverty as a social issue, contributing to grassroots-led advocacy for policy reform.
Building Community, Shaping Policy
Harriett’s Press is far more than a laundrette. It is a testament to inventive community responses to pressing social needs, demonstrating how art activity rooted in everyday life can restore dignity, build belonging, and generate individual and transformation. This report serves as a call to action, urging us to recognise the profound social impact of such initiatives and to invest in holistic, relational approaches to poverty, mental health, and community well-being.
For more information, you can read the full report here:
Magnetic Ideals has a series of eco-conscious, free, family-friendly events coming up, including gardening sessions (whether you have a garden or not!), Creative Climate Cafe building bug hotels, and beginners weaving classes with recycled materials. Please share with anyone who would be interested! We’re booking new events all the time, so follow our Eventbrite for up-to-date info, and please share with anyone who might be interested…
These workshops are part of a programme to help build community through creativity and skills sharing. The programme is here to help you Reconnect with your life and purpose, and we look forward to sharing this journey with you!
The launch of the Creative Climate Café Programme brought together artists, musicians, environmentalists, and community activists to celebrate funding for a new kind of climate café. This new programme, funded by the Rampion Community Benefit Fund, brings creative art practices into the traditional creative climate café format. This programme of ten cafes covers issues from the energy crisis, marine life and wetlands preservation.
A partnership project between Magnetic Ideals, Arts for Life and Ecotopia Now!, the Creative Climate Cafe initiative will help address eco-anxiety, and fuel conservation for vulnerable groups by running ten intergenerational, family-friendly Creative Climate Cafes that also address the cost-of-living crisis. These workshops will be hosted by experienced facilitators and community leaders with backgrounds in sustainability, mental health, eco-anxiety and community empowerment. Arts activities range from painting with natural dyes, to marbling and working with charcoals, the full programme of events is available on Eventbrite.
Kirsty Lumm from Arts for Life discussed how creative climate cafes, people will engage in healing artistic pursuits, and build community while learning to save money sustainably in the cost-of-living crisis. Each cafe addresses a different cost of living issue, from home fuel use, water use, food, social life and connections, sustainable purchasing, and empowering people to ask for change. Heather McKnight from Magnetic Ideas explained how at these builds on the Climate Psychology Association model of Climate Cafes as open, inclusive spaces for discussing climate change. Cafes allow a forum that can encourage action and educate in cost saving. Research indicates that these collective experiences can lead to better mental health outcomes and be better for the planet, as people move from anxiety to action. Booking for the creative climate cafes is available here.
Xenia Christopoulou from Ecotopia Now! gave an empowering talk about how small actions can make a big difference, and about how interconnected we are with the world around us. Katie Scanlan, the Rampion Stakeholder and Visitor Centre Manager, also gave at talk highlighting the way in which the Rampion Windfarm have been engaging with community both through the visitor centre, and through the Rampion Community Benefit Fund.
The launch event featured a soundscape by local musician Jim Purbrick under the guise of Remember Glaciers. The project Snæfellsjökull 2011 recalls memories of a road trip to an electronic music festival near the Snæfellsjökull glacier in Iceland. The story is told in fragments of dialogue from a more care free time when our only concerns were “Where’s the raves at in Iceland?”, how to make Salmiakki and whether the car would be able to get us there and back again.” You can hear edits of this stream from this live project on his YouTube.
A highlight of the night was a performance of protest song Under the Pee by Lorelei Mathias and Phil Johnstone comedically highlighting pollution in the sea. Lorelei is a comedian, author, mermaid… and founder of cause-powered comedy collective, www.Meloncomedy.com. Lorelei Mathias believes comedy has a unique power to create change, and has made work for South Coast Sirens (which she co-founded), and performed at Surfers Against Sewage /SOS Whitstable’s ‘Cut the Crap’ marches, as well as comedy shows from London to Melbourne. Phil Johnstone is a songwriter and musician in the Bedford Celts, The Qwarks and other projects and also works at the University of Sussex researching and teaching on sustainability transitions. He co-wrote Under the Pee with Lorelei.
Under the Pee Performance
Overall, the night was a wonderful opportunity to bring together people who were activists, artists, community and political leaders, as well as climate café participants from the original pilot scheme. While the climate crisis is very much upon us it is inspirational so see so many people taking part in projects big and small to inspire change, create change and bring the community together around one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced.
Utopia Falls (Feb 2020) is a ground-breaking and vastly under-discussed Canadian sci-fi TV show about Afrofuturism, youth activism, and eco-awareness.[1] Created by R.T Thorne, it is the first sci-fi hip hop cross-over, and challenges the white-heteronormative-masculine norms of the sci-fi genre, offering a cast that features mostly BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of colour) actors. The show represents diverse sexualities and kinships, placing women in authority.
Utopia Falls is set hundreds of years in the future where during surface wars the great flash sent everything dark, poisoning the world. The remaining survivors were forced underground until what emerged was New Babyl, a seemingly utopian society with a dystopian undertone. We see clear links with our ongoing real-life apocalyptic fears around climate crisis and nuclear extinction.
Things digress from the expected sci-fi narrative when we hear that “the youth of New Babyl have the most important duty of all”. This involves honouring their predecessors through training to compete in “The Examplar”, a music and dance competition that unites, entertains and inspires the people of New Babyl. The engagement of the young participants transforms, however, when they make a discovery about the past that will change their perspective and have far-reaching consequences for the people of new Babyl…
In our far-from-equilibrium times with pandemics, climate crisis, ongoing wars and genocides on one side, and high-profile activist movements of Black Lives Matter, and youth climate strikes on the other we should have expected such a TV show which is “about the erasure of history and Black culture in the future”[2] to be centred and discussed widely in the press?
Daniella Broadway, from Black Girl Nerds notes it “gives us what we’ve been waiting far too long for — representation for people of color in [TV] sci-fi.”[3] The writer, R.T. Thorne, is also a significant figure as chair of the BIPOC committee of the Directors Guild of Canada, hoping to “fight systemic racism and help create much-needed change in our industry.”[4]
However, while it came out in February 2020 it has received little interest despite its cultural relevance for the time we are in. I have not-yet been able to find any academic articles that reference it and have been shocked by the tirade of dismissive reviews and low ratings on sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. Disgustingly, this is part of the broader racist and discriminatory structures of the TV industry and society at large. The combination of sci-fi, dance and music on tv is undoubtedly a new one. We can speculate that the traditional world of TV reviewers have found this unsettling and failed to see its significance.
As the creator, R.T. Thorne himself notes, “[p]eople definitely looked at me weird when I first threw it out there a few years ago, just this idea of science fiction and hip hop.”[5] However, on further inspection, what is more surprising is that this hasn’t happened sooner. Science fiction has long been a space for stories of imaginaries of a better world, battles for equality, and critical interventions in the now by positioning dystopian futures.[6] Thorne had noticed that despite these narratives, these future scapes tended to be dominated by electronica and not the kind of music that would galvanise and politicise.
He saw a place for hip hop in how we imagine and critique our own futures in science fiction, as a music of protest as well as popularity. Hip hop forms a signifier in the show for both the erasure and reclamation of black histories. The show goes on to valorise the potentiality of non-violent protest, while also exploring physical and structural violence, tackling police brutality, the injustice of incarceration, privilege, nepotism, infertility, ableism, and precarious bodies in activism. [7]
While not necessarily gaining recognition on mainstream platforms, the show has garnered critical acclaim in the industry and a strong youth following. It has had nominations for the Canadian Screen Awards for best YA programme and direction, for the Canadian Society of Cinematographers Awards, and won the Tweens and Teens Award and Outstanding Achievement in Production Design at the Directors Guild of Canada.[8] It has also been a hit with young BIPOC and LGBT+ fans noting, “[f]or the first time there is a connection between art and what my life is actually like” and others stating that has been unique in the genre of TV sci-fi not only in its representation but also its stories which are set against a backdrop of people of colour trying to uncover stolen aspects of their cultural history.
Utopia Falls represents youth subcultures on television in a way that fundamentally values BIPOC, and LGBT+ lives, and aims to inspire knowledge informed activism and values the revolutionary potential of the arts.[9] Despite its relevance to teen engagement with Black Lives Matter protests, and School Strikes, season two has not-yet been announced. However, there is a clear call for its reinstatement in online petitions and teen-activist blogs that indicate we should not be ignoring the relevance of Utopia Falls, or its ability to inspire future sci-fi shows, as well as its viewers. [10]
As R.T. Thorne notes, the show is about a cultural revolution and not just a political one.[11] He states: “At the end of the day, [‘Utopia Falls’] might not be for everybody, I get that. It’s all good. I’m happy that we’re the first science-fiction hip hop [show and] bring hip hop into the future… There are black nerds out there that love whatever they love. I hope that it just inspires them now to be able to see that culture matters in a future scape.”[12]
Utopia Falls is a highly ambitious and influential show, and I will be writing more about it in due course. In the future, you’ll look back and be glad you watched this show, it’s a sea change, part of a transformational landscape of TV that educates, informs and inspires as it entertains.
[1] ‘Utopia Falls — CBC Media Centre’, accessed 28 June 2021, https://gem.cbc.ca/, //www.cbc.ca/mediacentre/program/utopia-falls. Note this has failed to be include in the recent Routledge guide to Teen TV, despite coming out after numerous other TV shows featured with less radical messaging.
