Utopics is a series of site-responsive spatial interventions that recursively apply sound, text, mirrors, video projections, and photogrammetry to distribute and amplify the presence of the elsewhere within the here-and-now.
It was first performed at 58th Venice Biennale, in ECC’s collateral exhibition at Palazzo Mora in May 2019 —
and in 2021 at St. Matthäus-Kirche, Kulturforum, Berlin, per Utopie Kulturforum’s fraught consideration of 19th and 20th century utopian visions.
Each iteration places material traces alongside physical attempts at tracing – while enabling missed traces, and the remainders they engender, to spill into subsequent architectures.
Utopics has also appeared at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, as part of Foretold Now, a series of events, screenings, and debates addressing the phenomenon of prognostication.
What does apocalypse sound like? How do the intensities of feeling that accompany such speculations converse with other drafts on timelessness such as utopia and cosmogony?
Utopics incorporates text projections that mind these questions, while building up layers of sonic decay as the reverberations of its previous architectural interiors accumulate with each iteration.
These texts emerge from an ambivalent consideration of progressive, Hegelian, and linear views of history.
In a psychoanalytic sense, they explore the preconscious topos of the human psyche.
Each iteration of the work contemporaneously indexes and mediates its placement.
Utopics was most recently performed at IF.BE (Ice Factory, Ballard Estate), Mumbai.
2024 editions are forthcoming at TV Control Center (KET), Athens; and ECC, Palazzo Michiel, Venice.