The Primal Path for Utopia and the End of the City: Paper given at at the 16th Annual International Conference of the European Utopian Studies Society, Newcastle University, UK.

The Paleo movement promotes a strategy of ‘rewilding’, most often, paradoxically performed in an urban context. For the 2015 USS Conference I propose a performative presentation that aims to articulate the role utopian imaginaries play in the Paleo promise of a cultural tabula rasa achieved through performance of a return to Nature.

My current research: It Matters What Stories We Tell to Tell Stories performs multi-layered narratives that collaboratively and temporarily construct knowledge, and is concerned with the leaky bounds of human nature revealed through perpetual material overflow between body, information and world.

Presented as live video-essay, the work will incorporate voices and imagery that cumulatively layer narratives that speak of a return to Nature as critique or denial of a Western human progress. Quotes taken from Paleo bloggers and Imperial first settlers in the New World will be placed alongside my own writing, and all will be orientated towards the Heideggarian idea of Worlding, which simultaneously offers posthuman and transhuman possibilities through making apparent the porous bounds of human, culture and nature.

Voices articulated as quotes and delivered as if my own will be accounted for through a take-home version of this script that will include a full bibliography. This polyvocal approach to representations of a given subject forms part of the perfomative methodology of my practice-led research.