pandemic dreams - open call

Dreaming a Post-Covid World

mapping or writing your ideal place from quarantine

Everyone has an ideal place. When you’re five it is probably the sweet counter at Woolworths; when you’re ten it might be a toyshop or the seaside on a summer day. But when you’re fifteen, twenty, thirty, fifty? The older you get, the more varied and complicated your version of an ideal place becomes. Is it an ideal place just for you, or your family or friends, or one which you want everyone to share? 

Colin Ward, Utopia, 1974

We invite all Livingmaps readers to draw or write about their ideal place -or the place you dream you could visit- in a post quarantine world. Covid-19 has limited our movement but also our capacity to plan. Confined to our homes, our imagination is our best ally to explore other places real or imagined. Quarantine highlights spatial inequalities and poses questions about our socio-political reality, prompting us to think of alternative arrangements. Dreaming with a different world outside can give us comfort but can also help us clarify how we would like the world to be. We can find inspiration in Thomas Moore’s map of Utopia, Madeleine de Scudéry’s Map of Tenderness or Umberto Eco’s collection of Legendary Lands. Mapping our ideas of the future can operate as a way of escape or liberation. It can serve as a pre-figuration of a better world, either locally or further beyond.

What places are you dreaming about visiting when the lockdown is over?

What would you like to encounter in your neighbourhood post-quarantine?

What is your ideal post-covid town or city?

There are two ways of participating in this open call:

1. Pandemic dreams - images

Please complete the following survey where you can upload your document with a title. A selection of images will be published in the next edition of our journal and discussed in an online event in September. 

1. Pandemic dreams - writing

All you need to do is to use this questionnaire to record a dream that you think is relevant to this project. Complete confidentiality is guaranteed and in the event that we wanted to quote one of your dream texts in anything we write we will contact you for permission first. A selection of texts will be published in the next edition of our journal and discussed in an online event in September. 

Curated by Phil Cohen and Sol Perez-Martinez