Utopia - just around the corning is a walking performance with Geert Vermeire, conceived on the "Utopia" book by Stefaan van Biesen, together forming an artistic walking duo since 2001 in a collaborative practice.

As a duo of walkers, they invite guest artists and the public to perform with them in a continuous series of walking performances in contemporary cities around the world.

The walk starting from Flushing Meadows Park goes along with an Utopia soundscape accessible on the website of STEP - Queens Museum and on the Locosonic app, allowing you to walk around  in the Flushing Meadows Park whlle listening to  the soundpiece  'Hythlodaeus 2015',  composed out of the poem 'Unfolding the City' by Geert Vermeire and 'Siren' by Stefaan van Biesen. Voice and compositions by Stefaan van Biesen, along field recordings of walks in Venice by both artists. 'Hythlodaeus 2015' has its name is inspired by the explorer of Utopia, and the composition originated during walks in Venice and in Antwerp where Thomas More wrote his book. Thecollected digital material was composed to a soundscape for the Utopia sound project for Cities and Memory - Oxford, that invited sound artists and musicians from across the world to reimagine one of the greatest works of English literature, using sound and creating something new from the words of Thomas More and the collective imagination of artists around the world – in an entirely new Utopia of sound. 

The project had 300,000 listens in the past years and recordes both the current reality of a place, and also present its imagined, alternative counterpart – in effect remixing the world. Every faithful field recording is accompanied by a reworking, a processing or an interpretation that imagines that place and time as somewhere else, somewhere new. The listener can choose to explore locations through their actual sounds, or explore interpretations of what those places could be – or to flip between the two different sound worlds at leisure.

More’s Utopia explores the society, behaviour, law, customs and culture of the inhabitants of Utopia – a coinage that can be seen to mean both ‘good/ideal place’ and ‘nowhere’.

However, despite the space given over to the topography of the country and the appearance of its cities and people, there are only a scattered handful of references to sound. The most notable reference to sound is simple: ““[The Utopians] entertain themselves with the delights let in at their eyes, their ears, and their nostrils as the pleasant relishes and seasoning of life, which Nature seems to have marked out peculiarly for man, since no other sort of animals contemplates the figure and beauty of the universe… nor do they apprehend the concords or discords of sound.”

What were those concords and discords of sound that so delighted or repulsed the Utopians?