Opening – The River Mouth

Sonic Territories Festival 2026 opens around a shared table. The sound of conversations and eating may flow into one another, creating an opening situated somewhere between fine dining, collective ritual and gentle anarchy.

This experimental dinner brings political theory, collective practice and food to the same table. Conceived as a shared space for reflection and pleasure, it invites participants to experience care work from a different perspective and to explore what makes autonomous—or “real-utopian”—spaces tangible and alive.

At its centre is a seasonal, plant-based meal accompanied by a series of amuse-bouches, built around a pho-inspired broth with handmade noodles, vegetables and plant-based proteins. Eating together becomes both a sensory experience and a practical inquiry into how alternative social relations can be created and sustained.

The evening unfolds around three interconnected themes. The first considers radical care work as a prefigurative practice: not simply as support or maintenance, but as a central element of social life and a tangible starting point for sustainable political change beyond capitalist realism.

The second explores sustainable hedonism as a hopeful response to climate collapse and its implications for left-wing activism. If political ambitions are increasingly shaped by the conditions of survival, pleasure, abundance and collective enjoyment must not disappear. Instead, they can become conscious and necessary parts of building liveable futures.

Finally, the dinner turns toward conflict—both the pressures imposed on autonomous spaces from the outside and the conflicts reproduced within them through socialisation and activist practice. How might care and a more conscious engagement with conflict make these spaces more resilient?

Through food, conversation and collective experience, the evening asks how care, pleasure and disagreement can become part of a prefigurative practice: one that does not merely imagine other ways of living, but begins to make them present.