I am participating with three new video tutorials in the exhibition “NUTOPIA – NEW CITY” at Studio 44 and TEGEN2 in Stockholm.
“NUTOPIA – NEW CITY gathers artists, architects, and researchers to explore the question of constructing a new city for some of the world’s many refugees. A starting point is the realization that flight and migration predate communities and cities.
The utopian, the fictionally imagined place of nowhere, is an important source of energy for political imagination but is also seen as the path towards authoritarian experiments and an overly optimistic ordering of life. Today, when the absence of hopeful, egalitarian, and radical visions is deafening, large-scale investments are still being made – with the relocation of Kiruna and emerging battery cities. Thus, the line between utopianism and pragmatic realism is drawn differently depending on whether commercial or humanitarian driving forces rule.
But suppose the utopian is the escape of thought (and art) from a dystopian reality. In that case, fleeing war and oppression can be seen as both the most necessary and utopian of actions, in the movement towards something unknown, perhaps better. Seen this way, the refugee is an essential community builder.
The exhibition is created through a process involving 12 artists who have created many new works never before showcased. In the exhibition are also booklets created by students in the Master course NUTOPIA: Rethinking Architecture and Migration is a collaboration between KTH Architecture and the Museum of Forgetting.”
Curated by Erik Berggren by Ida Rödén
Participating artists are Muhammad Ali, Heba Y. Amin, Maria Backman, Kalle Brolin, Nils Claesson, Felice Hapetzeder, John Huntington, Jakob Krajcik, Kristina Müntzing, Cecilia Parsberg, Erik Pauser, Paula Urbano & Nina Wedberg Thulin
Opening: Friday 23/2, TEGEN2: 17-20 and Studio 44: 17-22.
The image is a still from my film “How to Liquify the Organization (Alchemy at the workplace – Part 1)”