Institute
of Meetings &
Non-Meetings

Corner of Town Hall Square and Rüütli Street, Tartu, Estonia 

The Embassy of Utopia is a space and thought experiment, whose doors are open from May 8th to 13th as part of the Prima Vista literature festival and Tartu 2024 European Capital of Culture program. 

The Embassy of Utopia is a sanctuary for positive uncertainty, bold thinking, and untamable imagination. It is a meeting place for poets who never write any poetry and for those for whom writing is the only possible form of existence, for vagabonds on their way to new tomorrows, and for archaeologists whose shovels dig into the sands of the future.

The Embassy of Utopia offers a space for ideas that are too wild to fit into newspapers with long and illustrious histories, too audacious to be spoken by politicians' greased lips, too poetic to find readers in the murky depths of the internet, yet too beautiful, too painful, and too important to leave unspoken.

From the evening of May 8th until the early hours of May 13th, the Embassy of Utopia will host 5 keynote addresses and 550 speeches about longing for a different existence. The five speeches, which open the doors to a world of boundless imagination every night at nine o'clock, will be given by Mehis Heinsaar, Maarja Pärtna, Cloud Circuit, Hans Platzgumer, and Clara Amaral.

The 550 speeches will be delivered by people — writers and judges, poets, students and teachers, foresters and businessmen, editors, critics, activists, architects, actors and explorers, lost, forgotten, famous and unknown, academics and non-academics — people who seek their way through the same fog and look at the same sun that shines on all of us.