What if you could build a social agenda at a festival? And not any kind of an agenda, but an Agenda for Social Transformation. On the 23rd–24th of September we are going to give it a go. Every session at the Untitled festival builds towards our agenda for transformation.
The 2021 Untitled festival is not just another event after which we go back to our daily lives and the world remains unchanged. It brings together new perspectives, narratives and models for reorganising life. We all know this: In order for civilised life to exist on this planet, we must uproot our ways of living and fundamentally reimagine our central institutions: how we come together to produce, consume, govern, relate, care, share and create.
Most people understand this need for change. Most agree that the current decade is critical. But we are still lacking a clear transformative agenda, and this is why we constantly revert back to our previous ways of thinking.
In other words, we should start envisioning an agenda for transformation. This agenda should not be just for sustaining, protecting and mitigating risk to current institutions built for an era of pursuing individual success at any cost. It should be one that honours the fundamental truth of interdependence of all things living and material.
UNTITLED is an experiment on imagining a transformative social agenda – we will start building it together at our second annual Festival on the 23rd and 24th of September. It brings together activists, theoreticians and practitioners of social change from the Untitled Alliance and beyond.
Three components of the agenda
But, what do we really mean by this agenda for transformation? We at Untitled Alliance have sensed a demand for a deeper understanding of at least three components of current social agendas – narratives of change, models for organising life and novel perspectives on our world. To help us improve on these components, there are three kinds of sessions at the festival:
New Narratives
An agenda for transformation needs to improve upon the currently dominant narratives on change in society. That is why Festival’s participants are hosting a number of sessions dedicated to jointly developing new narratives of transformation. Some of these include: Politics of Being, New Geography of Living, Anti-Rival economies and Heat Resilient Cities. We further invite proposals for other novel narratives of social change.
New Experimental Models
An agenda for transformation needs radical ideas on how to reorganise life on our planet. That is why there are a number of sessions where new experimental models are developed by their initiators and co-creators, such as Free Houses, Trees as Infrastructure, Long Term Care Centers, Biodiversity Buildings and Civic Spaces. We encourage you to propose new experimental models to be included in the agenda.
New Perspectives
An agenda for transformation must not only offer narratives and institutions, but it should also offer entirely new ways of seeing the world, and use these perspectives as a basis for our future thinking. That is why we have a number of New Perspectives sessions for artistic, novel and weird ways of working with the world, including Grief as an Overlooked Force of Change, Freedom is Relational, Breaking through the Sugar Glass, From S-curve to X-curve, Everything is a Citizen and Expanding the Rave.
A journey into the unimagined
Untitled festival collects people who work at the forefront of social and ecological transformation to a journey into the unimagined in order to return with an agenda for social transformation.
The festival is the first step of this process. It will initiate a debate on the agenda for transformation. We fully acknowledge that the first version of an agenda will be contradictory, yet believe that openness and inclusivity in the way it is built is crucial. It will be a work in progress, a living document. We are committed to allow the agenda to evolve until it becomes a description of the reality around us. In order to be able to reach the goal, we need to start, and define the untitled.
At Untitled Festival, you can become a custodian and organise a session. You can also join as an imagineer to contribute to the work set up by the custodians. Attendance is by invitation or by application.
Welcome to start the trip to imagine, work and play together.