At a time when we are learning to navigate digital spaces—and when it often feels easier to imagine the end than a utopia—visual artist Esben Holk (they/them) invites us into a virtual space of possible and impossible futures. In their video game-like digital sculpture, we are free to explore and remix different visions of alternative futures.
Roskilde Festival and Betty Nansen Teatret have partnered since 2018 and are this year collaborating to create a sister piece that will be exhibited at GRASP 2025 and at Betty Nansen Teatret. “Sister pieces” is Betty’s interdisciplinary initiative, where artists are invited to create new artworks based on a “mother piece” — one of the theatre’s seasonal productions.
At a workshop at Betty Nansen Teatret, Esben Holk gathered participants' utopias in their digital cauldron and has now processed and distilled the data. During the workshop, storytelling, worldbuilding, and concept development were woven into an alchemical framework — aiming to free us from tradition and the past, and to imagine new, magical utopias.
The work Synthesizing Utopias continues the metaphor of the alchemist: it cultivates conversation, distills concepts, images, and visions of the future into concentrated forms, and remixes these components into fluid visions of utopia—liberated from the limitations of contemporary imagination.
Esben Holk explores identity and the body through digital worlds and creative coding. As a self-proclaimed content fetishist, they examine symbols and meaning-making from a queer-feminist perspective—where norms and rigid identities are shattered into thousands of pixels.
Participants
- Esben Holk, visual artist and self-proclaimed content fetishist
This session is presented by Roskilde Festival Group in collaboration with Betty Nansen Teatret.