What Digs Utopia?

September 24, 2022 6:30PM-7:30PM

Event Information:
How old were you when the contract started to have binding power over your psyche? When did playing on the sand digger at the playground turn from game to career choice? The bottomless pit of condo development swallows the landscape under the contract-regime. So we ask: is this utopia, dystopia, game, and/or anti-game?

Combining the formats of seminars, workshops, and performances, the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective (TETC) renegotiates relationships within and across languages and media. Using methods of homophonics, transcription, field recording, algorithmic distortion, and cross-disciplinary hybridity TETC creates spaces for heterotopic pedagogy. The texts, recordings, and performances produced document TETC’s unlearning of prior assumptions around communication. These activities develop strategies for withdrawal from the instrumentalization of language systems. In addressing the hegemonic power of major languages, TETC brings to the fore language’s potential in play and protest.

What Digs Utopia? was a participatory performance lead by TETC presented in parallel with Simon Rabyniuk’s The second mouth of the Don River: an open rehearsal on September 24th 2022.


Part of Implicit Choreographies & Relational Topographies

All images courtesy of Ananna Rafa