UTOPIA

brie is a graphic artist. Their work is recognisably pastel shades of pink, lilac and teal, and has a distinctive ethereal, wavy and dreamlike quality. Their portraits cast their subjects speculatively as faeries, angels, beings with wings and pointed ears. They draw, they imagine, they make spaces very beautiful. We talk about clubs: Aiva and I in favour, Brie not so much. “I like to lounge more than I like to dance.” They did their MA dissertation on imagining what the future of LGBT spaces could look like as opposed to existing spaces, which are mostly limited to bars and clubs. In lockdown, as a sort of continuation of this project, they imagined their dream space and designed it in the Sims 4: a community centre where you can socialise, dance, lounge, swim, work, make art, make music or just exist.

“The logistics aren’t really worked out.” 

London-based artist, abolitionist and activist Liv Wynter introduced me to the work of theatre-maker Sarah Kane, whose plays are grim enough to require paragraphs of content warnings, but include stage directions such as “A sunflower bursts through the floor and grows above their heads.”  This is a beautiful illustration of a philosophy where we aim high and work out the logistics later – kind of like working backwards. It’s a pretty significant point in abolitionist thinking, and is a useful way to think about brie’s design, I think.

Variously over the call, voice notes, messages, and previous conversations, brie describes the space and the ways it works. 

[20:45, 19/01/2022] brie: “So my dream spaces are definitely community centres. The one that I was imagining definitely has a pool. It has trans only swim nights. It would be so good – cause so many trans people haven’t been able to swim in so long, like… being in water is so healing, and fun, and beautiful and so good. So a pool is important.” 

I ask whether the pool would be lit. “As dimly lit as possible without it being a health hazard.” We talk about how trans bodies in the world sometimes don’t have access to a swimming pool. The centre would hold art nights, project beautiful scenes on the walls and in the swimming pool. Lots of people work at this centre: they work a small amount of hours and are paid a fair living wage.

[20:49, 19/01/2022] brie: “Some other important features would be communal working areas; like computers, printers, the kind of stuff that a public library would have. And like a workshop with tools that you can go and use: woodworking area, communal art and music-making supplies because art and music supplies are expensive, and in an ideal world there would be a community centre in every neighbourhood, with things that people need to live life and also make art, accessible and within walking distance to every person – making it easy and accessible for everybody to live a happy fulfilling life.”

brie’s getting excited. We talk about waste. “People wouldn’t need so much room to store stuff – say you need a hammer. Now, probably everyone on a street has a hammer but it’s maybe only used every few months, if that. Imagine there was a communal tool shed on each road that people could borrow toolboxes from when they get their new Ikea furniture.” “What if you needed a couch?” Aiva is ever practical. We could all get together and make a couch. Call on the dykes with drills. But seriously. 

“It shouldn’t be so easy to buy so much stuff…but it should be easy to access things,” brie says. This is the crucial point on which the community centre vision rests. 

[20:50, 19/01/2022] brie: “I don’t think I’ve talked about gardens – communal gardens with herbs and food and flowers and whatever other useful things that people want to grow. The whole neighbourhood having input into what kind of things you grow that year – just being a space for everyone to utilise and have a say in what’s going on”

“Remember when we talked about our dream plants – well the plant that I described then, in a fantasy world that would be in the community centre.” The dream plant they mean is a callback to a conversation we had in lockdown one, where we described to each other the plants that we would like to exist. brie’s is classically ethereal: wavy strands of silvery seaweed float above the ground. It feeds off social energy and joy. There is no gravity within it, so people can float, too. (My plant, as far as I can remember, was a leafless, umbrella-like tree with a network of roots spreading water and nutrients to other plants that needed it.)

“I think it would be so nice to float around a pretty plant with your pals.” 

We talk about these spaces as something that should be achievable. For every community. “You shouldn’t have to commute across a city to get to something that should be essential!” I think about all the people I know who grew up in rural areas. Miles from anywhere. 

What are the practicalities that would get in the way? Aiva says, “People would just disagree. People won’t do this sort of thing. They are too argumentative.” 

“That’s cause they don’t think there’s any other option.”

“Every area should have a community centre. But instead, we just spent 8 million on making Big Ben uglier.”

Aiva and I digest this. None of us are English, yet capital and news has become contextually  stretched so that a ludicrous amount of money spent on gilding Big Ben can represent any number of things in the places we are from or currently live in. We don’t know our neighbours well enough to lend them a hammer, or borrow theirs. Although we can definitely start asking. Kirrin lends us their drill regularly, although recently they’ve stopped replying. I hope they’re okay.