There’s just over a week left until the “Brieftopia: Archives of Futurity” symposium on 23 and 24 May in Gabrovo, and over the next few days, we’ll introduce you to the speakers who will be taking part—artists, curators, researchers, and thinkers from Bulgaria and around the world.
They will speak about the future, memory, crises, utopias, and those fleeting moments when it seems possible to imagine something different.
Register for the last remaining spots at:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1F7nCTv5y3Jf35u43A7ZbpqqiZdF4lMfCTKIvkZBLUrM/viewform?edit_requested=true
We start with Behzad K. Noori
In his introductory lecture, artist Behzad K. Noori, who coined the term Brieftopia, describes many facets we have yet to fully discover as closely related to the concept of futurity. Noori situates Brieftopia as both a concept and a method of thinking and practice that emerges from disillusionment yet refuses paralysis. Against the neoliberal capture of the future, far from a symbolic gesture or an emotional retreat into nostalgia, brieftopia is positioned as a practice of surviving failure, proposing a practice of imagination as a lived, fragile, and collective act.
Brieftopia is the final threshold before imagination turns real, often passed unnoticed.
Behzad Khosravi Noori is an artist, writer, educator, and history-teller. His artistic practices include films, installations, and archival studies. His works investigate histories from the Global South, labour and the means of production, and histories of political relationships that have existed as a counter-narration to the East-West, North-South dichotomy.
With the support of the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Bulgaria