Prior to this event, on November 12th at 20:30 Marco van Duijn together with Josephine Chambers will talk about the political potential of Utopia. For more info & the link visit: https://www.utopie.nl/podcast-the-political-potential-of-utopia/
Opening its doors at 13:00, the café offers its space for a full afternoon dedicated to rethinking our present through the book presentation of “The Unpredictable Past of the Future – The Political Potential of Utopia”. At the heart of the book is a unique example of social utopian political eco-feminist science fiction for children, written in 1924–1925 by a mysterious young girl, “Little Zora” discovered by researcher dr Biljana Andonovska. Edited and published by PhD In One Night and Edicija Jugoslavija, this 500-page book offers a radical vision of aesthetic and eco-education, social equality, and collective imagination through the principle of hope called Utopia.
Ivana Momčilović, dramaturg and editor of the book, will share the novel’s historical and political relevance, including its surprising resonance with both Surrealism and today’s student protests in Serbia. The evening includes precious guests Josephine Chambers, Katia Truijen, Elisabetta Cuccaro, and Marco van Duijn, who will offer a polyphony of views on what Utopia can mean and how it can be practiced. The event is an invitation to rethink education, fiction, and collective learning as acts of resistance and a chance to discuss together about the future we wish to begin now.
Short biographies
Ivana Momčilović is a Yugoslav playwright, poet, and researcher who lives in Belgium but also wherever her work takes her. Her practice focuses on redefining concepts of the nonexistent, the impossible, and temporary free territories, applying them in the fields of contemporary aesthetics and politics, as well as placing philosophy and art into various spheres of everyday life, such as education, migrant movements, gardening, and permaculture. She explores the relationship between fiction and ideology, as well as between aesthetics, politics, and the “amateur” approach to knowledge and forms of collective intelligence. She is the initiator and active member of several collectives: Collective EI-Migrative Art; Edicija Jugoslavija (a self-publishing initiative), PhD In One Night – a platform for aesthetic experimentation for all, and the Laboratory of Radical Peace. Since 2005, within PhD In One Night, she has developed various methods of knowledge sharing as collective artistic creation, aimed at self-organized groups, children, students, and researchers of all ages.
Josephine (Josie) Chambers is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Futures Studio at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. Her research develops and examines approaches to questioning so-called ‘inevitable’ unjust futures and fostering collective imagination and agency towards more just and sustainable societies. She weaves together critical and artistic concepts and approaches to collaboratively explore possibilities for transformative changes with diverse societal groups. Josie shares recent experiments in social dreaming in her blog Utopian Pulses. Her latest publication Utopia*Art*Politics is a collection of work by 33 artist-researcher practitioners experimenting with how artistic practices can enable radical imagination and politics.
Katía Truijen is a media researcher, curator, educator and musician. Her work is concerned with bringing people together around practices of listening, archiving, and rehearsing alternative urban, technological and ecological futures. Katía is part of Loom, practice for cultural transformation, and co-founder of interdisciplinary platform //\ hoekhuis. She curates the context programme for Rewire festival and Ultima festival, and is research tutor at the Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Instituut. Between 2014 and 2021, Katía developed research projects and public programmes at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Epistemic Imaginaries – Learning as Festivity is her latest publication, which she edited with Brandon LaBelle in 2025.
Elisabetta Cuccaro (Italy, 1992) is an “indisciplinary” art critic and curartist. She studied Painting (Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milano) in Italy, Contemporary Arts Practice (HKB, Bern) in Switzerland, and Arts, Cognition, and Criticism, (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) in the Netherlands, where she currently resides. Her practice taps into the unsolvable mystery of (re)presentation cracked open at the interstice of word and image and explored at the intermedial crossing of critical and artistic practices. She pursues new languages for and understandings of art criticism, focusing on exhibition-making as an art practice and the role of poetry in criticism, through visual cartographies, collective workshops, poetic critiques, and reflections that challenge the boundaries between disciplines and paradigms, knowledge and meaning.
Marco Van Duijn is a practising lawyer, co-founder of the Dutch Association for Animal Law, chair of the Cooperative Association Utopie U.A., and chair of the Utopie Foundation. Van Duijn is also a member of the Association for Environmental Law and has a pod cast about politics called Recht voor Allen (Justice for All). Over the past decades, Van Duijn has been involved in various anti-capitalist organisations and networks and has established several political social centres in his home town. The most recent is Grand Cafe Utopie, a meeting place for idealists.
Doors open: 13:00
Start event: 14:00
