The ambassador’s reception of the Embassy of Utopia hostedby Ambassador Cloud Circuit (Canada)

Wednesday, May 10th

21.00

at the Embassy premises on the corner of Rüütli Street and Town Hall Square

The Embassy of Utopia is a space and thought experiment, whose doors are open from May 8th to 13th as part of the Prima Vista literature festival and Tartu 2024 European Capital of Culture program.

The Embassy of Utopia is a sanctuary for positive uncertainty, bold thinking, and untamable imagination. It is a meeting place for poets who never write any poetry and for those for whom writing is the only possible form of existence, for vagabonds on their way to new tomorrows, and for archaeologists whose shovels dig into the sands of the future. The Embassy of Utopia offers a space for ideas that are too wild to fit into newspapers with long and illustrious histories, too audacious to be spoken by politicians’ greased lips, too poetic to find readers in the murky
depths of the internet, yet too beautiful, too painful, and too important to leave unspoken.

The doors of the Embassy of Utopia open on the evening of May 8th at the corner of Town Hall Square and Rüütli Street and remain open until the early hours of May 13th. When the Ambassador of Utopia exits the building, the Embassy itself becomes mobile. On such occasions, the Embassy can be imagined as a circle with the Ambassador at its centre, and with a diameter equal to the sound of the Ambassador’s voice, but no less than 7 metres. From the evening of May 8th until the early hours of May 13th, the Embassy of Utopia will host 5 keynote addresses and 550 speeches about longing for a different existence.

The five speeches, which open the doors to a world of boundless imagination every night at nine o’clock, will be given by Mehis Heinsaar, Maarja Pärtna, Cloud Circuit, Hans Platzgumer, and Clara Amaral. The 550 speeches will be delivered by people — writers and judges, poets, students and teachers, foresters and businessmen, editors, critics, activists, architects, actors and explorers, lost, forgotten, famous and unknown, academics and non-academics — people who seek their way through the same fog and look at the same sun that shines on
all of us.

The Embassy of Utopia is created by Jan Teevet and Oliver Issak, and the project manager of the Embassy is Lisanna Lajal.