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What happens if you ask 100 different Dutch people about their ideal country? And turn that into an illustration? This is what YoutopiaLab did, a volunteer collective that wants to show what the Netherlands dreams of. The results are shared through insightful drawings and lectures.
Making these dreams visible is the goal of the YoutopiaLab. YoutopiaLab is a collective led by visual storyteller Anabella Meijer and consists of volunteers, climate psychologists, cartoonists, artists and scientists. Over the past 1.5 years, we have been actively looking for a diverse group of Dutch people and asked them to describe their 'youtopia' through 15 open questions. Our interviewers listened without judgment and our illustrators depicted the dreams.
During the exhibition at BioArt Laboratories, these 'youtopias' will be shared with the general public for the first time. With our artistic data visualization technique, we have made the similarities and differences between the dreams visible through color coding. We lift the veil on the most frequently mentioned elements during the conversations and you can create your own youtopia during the exhibition.
What we see in the drawings is that the Symbiocene is much closer than it seems at first glance. Although there is great diversity in world views, we also see a clear similarity: in many youtopias many people want something different from the society we live in now. There is a lot of greenery and one of the most common holidays is celebrating the seasons. Celebrating, in short, our connection with nature.
