Galway was briefly transformed, with the advent of the Volvo Ocean Race, around the nearly utopian imaginary of a city that embraces strangers. Corporate allusions to ideas and practices that represent the good life - e.g. compassion and hospitality - echoed, even appropriated, the city's historic self-image. Maeve Mulrennan has curated a show within this context. She asks, "Are we in a temporary space, in a fold, holding our breath until we are needed again as a city of welcomes?" Taxonomies of the possible, utopias are good places that are nowhere. In utopia's absence, heterotopias are cultivated, where otherness may be experienced or explored, "spaces of alternate ordering." (1) In the festival's transient space, visitors and inhabitants coalesce into a community of consumers and boat-lovers, if temporarily. Exhibitions are heterotopias as well, where alternate realities, subjectivities and senses of time co-exist. Mulrennan has transformed a vast theatre space into a warren of black boxes, each containing a projection. Sounds resonate, gently vie. Uniting different flows of light and ideas, this heterotopia permits many utopias to co-exist.