Future Utopia Community Key is an Artist in Residence (AiR) program rooted in the rural village of Uddebo and its surrounding territory. Its central idea is simple and demanding: to align artistic practice with the concrete social, ecological, economic, and political needs of a rural community committed to sustainability and the defence of the commons. The program operates as a collaborative agency rather than a conventional residency. It prioritises process over product, social bonding over individual authorship, and situated knowledge over abstract speculation. Artists and thinkers are invited to work with the village, not on it, embedding themselves in everyday life and contributing to collective imaginaries of post-human, post-capitalist, and post-colonial futures. The focus lies on utopian models understood not as fantasies, but as pragmatic tools for transformation. Future Utopia Community Key adopts a cross-disciplinary approach, welcoming visual artists, philosophers, architects, designers, researchers, and innovators. Particular attention is given to the economic and social conditions of art-making, exploring alternative modes of production, exchange, and care. Rurality is approached as a site of resistance and experimentation, where new forms of social organisation can be tested at a human scale. Four guest residents are invited each year through invitation or partnerships with institutions and funding bodies. Residencies last one to two weeks, recurring periodically over a two-year cycle. Outcomes vary widely in form—discursive, spatial, performative, or relational—but share a commitment to context-based collaboration and socio-political agency. The long-term aim is to articulate a replicable model of self-sustainability: flexible, adaptive, and transferable to other rural contexts. In this sense, the residency functions less as a retreat and more as a living laboratory for collective futures.
