We Can Build a New Utopia (2021) was an invitation to resist the urge to return to ‘business as usual’ and instead use this opportunity to radically reimagine the cultural sector for the 21st century. Read the full report here and read the version here. 

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When the world went into lockdown, some of our quietest voices were those of our artists. Around Aotearoa, our visionaries watched as their workplaces shut down. Theatres, museums and galleries sat empty. Roads were quiet. Retail and hospitality spaces — traditionally a supplementary source of income — closed their doors. And while the rest of us turned to our screens, our shelves, and our headphones, a fog of uncertainty settled over the year. How would art survive?

We know the refrain: the pandemic has been a chance to reset, to rediscover what matters, and to rethink how we want to live our lives. It’s also been an opportunity to see the world in sharper detail than ever before, and to trace the fractures in our foundation.

In the first six months of the pandemic in Aotearoa, more than 1.6 million people lost a significant part of their income and more than 11,000 people lost their jobs — at least 10,000 of whom were women, many of whom were young, many of whom were Māori. We saw the number of people struggling to put food on the table double to one in every five people. The housing crisis intensified to a state of emergency. Mental health issues spiked. We witnessed an increase in racism towards our many Asian communities, towards our Moana Oceania communities, towards tangata whenua. We stood in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and we started asking ourselves how we let any of this happen.

In times like these, we need hope. And we found it: in a leader who guided us to become one of the safest countries in the world. Bloomberg’s Oct 2020 Market Crisis Management Index ranked New Zealand top in the world on political stability, economic recovery, virus control and social resilience. We’re right to feel lucky.

But we’re also right to want more. Our duty to one another has never felt more profound, and this is a rare moment. With many of our essential industries in turmoil, the question is not simply one of survival and recovery. It’s understanding that now is the time to be bold. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to critically examine the systems that no longer serve us and to radically reimagine our individual and collective futures for the better.

As we emerge from the pandemic, the temptation will be to claw back to how things were before. It’s human instinct: we’re reassured by the familiar. But returning to the status quo is the worst thing we could possibly do. Historically, the arts have acted as a portal to alternative futures, the soil from which imagination blooms, the catalyst that nourishes relationships, sparks ideas, fuels our evolution. But if we don’t act now? We’re delivering an unintentional death sentence, in which the arts become a nice-to-have — ornamental and necessary to only a few, instead of the beating heart we know it to be. We’re committing to a future that denies people hope.

So where to? And what can we learn from our leaders — our architects of imagination, map-makers to the unknown? We asked some of the most inspiring voices in our sector to share the questions they’ve been asking as they imagine a new utopia.

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