14 & 15 November 2024
Edinburgh Futures Institute
In this session, Dr Jimmy Turner and Francesca Vale presented their visions of a utopia in which everyone has an equal but individual seat at the table. On our own and in groups, we responded to these visions by designing and creating chairs that offer comfort and community to people of all descriptions and abilities. The chairs we produced were then the starting point for a curatorial exploration in which we considered how the chairs interact with one another and what they represent for the world or worlds they inhabit. We talked about what Utopia means and how it could be a useful crucible in which to explore positive change.
Day 1: Sharing and Making
Day 2: Curating and Contemplating, Exhibition
Biographies
Jimmy Turner is a Research Fellow for the Binks Hub at the University of Edinburgh with a background in anthropology and gender studies. Their woodworking practice started as a hobby in 2018, and has since developed into an artistic and curational practice which frequently merges into the ethnographic and social research contexts in which they work. This has recently seen Jimmy work with colleagues from the EFI and local community to make the ‘Spirit Case’ sculpture which lives on the third floor of Edinburgh Futures Institute, collaborate with the Ripple Project in NE Edinburgh on a community-led arts/research project, and collaborate artistically with colleagues from Edinburgh, Newcastle and Kings College London on the AHRC ‘Fail again, fail better’ project, which explores utopia and failure.
Frankie Vale is a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow. She is currently halfway through her doctoral project, which uses a blended scholarly and practice-based approach to consider the representation of breast cancer surgery in art and curation. Currently she is co-curating the Empowered Journeys project with people who have had breast cancer surgery to produce artworks and pieces of text based on their lived experience. These artworks will go into an exhibition that will consider representation and investigate how curation and creativity can challenge the narratives that society projects onto post-surgery bodies. Previously she undertook a Masters by Research in Collections and Curating Practices, in which she co-curated the Art in Mind exhibition, an exploration of art and mindfulness, and completed her dissertation on the rarely-acknowledged collaborative processes of queer surrealist photographers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
The beautiful documentary photos below are thanks to Chris Scott.
Day 1:
Day 2:
