For the past two decades, Sydney-based creative experience company Semi Permanent has been connecting global brands and creative audiences through its slate of international events. Its flagship Semi Permanent Festival of Creativity and Design has been transplanted from Sydney to New York to London and in 2021, Abu Dhabi. This year, Singapore will finally experience what the festival has to offer albeit in a smaller scale.
Semi Permanent: City Utopia is a capsule edition of the flagship festival and is set to be a three-day event. It will be part of Audi Singapore’s House of Progress to be held at the ArtScience Museum—a showcase of the brand’s vision of premium electric mobility. In line with that, Semi Permanent will be bringing together a group of like-minded creatives in the field of sustainability and design that will share insights on how the future of design can help the pressing global issue.
The capsule festival will be headlined by special guest Liam Young across all three days. The designer, director and BAFTA-nominated producer is set to open Semi Permanent: City Utopia with Planet City, a speculative look into the future where an estimated global population of 10 billion people live, and where science, technology and art come together as a response to climate change.
Young will then hold an intimate conversational masterclass on the second day, delving further into future urbanism and sharing insights into how he builds his speculative worlds. The final day of the event will see Young be part of a City Utopia panel discussion, hosted by Anita Kapoor and joined by Singaporean artist and educator Zen Teh, Roger&Sons director Morgan Yeo, as well as Audi Singapore’s managing director Markus Schuster. With the kind of experience and range of creative expertises involved, the City Utopia panel discussion will proffer blueprints for the urban centres of the future.
The best thing is, every single event throughout the three-day festival is open to the public for free. And if this is only but a teaser of what to expect from Semi Permanent, here’s hoping that there’ll be more.
The Semi Permanent: City Utopia will run from 4 to 6 April 2023 at the ArtScience Museum. Tickets are now available for free online.
