Issue 4: Summer 2009

In Search of Utopia

Nun's Island, Galway
3 May - 6 June 2009

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.

The question of culture plagues the imagining of all utopias. Whose utopia? Thomas More's Utopia is founded via a violent colonial project: Utopos, its founder, moves forests, carves an island from the mainland, and assimilates (or annihilates) the previous inhabitants. No utopia exists without the destructive force of the imagination. Dorothy Cross's Selam (2007) and Ossicle (2008) are two videos on monitors shown side to side. In Ossicle, whalebone is rocked; its deep vibrations increase until it appears silent, only to linger, still rocking, in the listener's memory. In Selam, a bearded old man sings. He starts to cry, pauses, utters what might be an apology, sings anew. But his eyes wet again, at which point the video ends. The performance is untranslated. We do not know that he is a shark-caller from the Melanesian island of New Ireland, singing a song usually sung alone at sea, in his canoe after catching a shark. So we must ask ourselves, in our un-knowledge, unsettling questions: What is he singing about? What traumas has he endured to make him cry so? To infer the postcolonial moment is nearly unavoidable. In the utopian gestures of the colonial moment, the cultures of original inhabitants have been erased or repressed. Perhaps the two videos belong to each other. Liminal folds of social space, these moments reveal what is stubbornly resonant despite the absence of movement . . . or achingly absent, despite the resonance of song.

For Whose Utopia (2006), Cao Fei spent six months at a lighting factory in the Pearl River Region, which has undergone tremendous economic growth in recent years. The video unfolds in three parts. In "Imagination of Product", industrial production is a marvel of precision and symmetry, maintained by the rituals and incredible energy of human labor. Hands are shown ceaselessly sorting the product on which their work-being depends. What of the worker's spirit-being? In "Factory Fairytale", the same hands fold, stretch, caress space, as workers perform the rituals of dance, silent and melancholy. A girl in a tutu pirouettes against a backdrop of machinery. A man snakes down the factory's pathways. A guitar is played, on mute. A young woman lies in a ramshackle bunk bed, looking out of her window at a vast compound of chimneys and warehouses. In "My Future is Not a Dream", a song inquires, in accented English, "Real dusk would not arrive/but the flood of summer/light had begun to ebb/But to whom do you beautifully belong?" Obviously interrupted at their workstations, workers pose, at turns weary, smiling, impatient. These faces belong to a generation that has migrated in phenomenal numbers to China's more prosperous regions. If imagination is social practice, what new worlds are being imagined by the emerging migrant culture of the Pearl River Region? The factory is a heterotopic space where fantasies, opportunities and limits flourish around a lightbulb.

Suspension Room (2008) is a video projection by Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, accompanied by an atonal soundtrack. A dead sheep rots in the infinity of a moving, digitally altered landscape. Grass is layered over water, which undulates and reflects the flight of birds. Time unfolds, marked by a drifting, nowhere-going balloon in a limitless sky. A television lies semi-submerged in the grass-water. This is a stagnant, postmodern dystopia, caught between a dismembered past and an unimaginable future. Where the sun lies at the horizon, neither rising nor setting, the hope of transcendence decays in a perpetual twilight.

Utopian desires require vehicles to new worlds, and the daring to commandeer the future, for dangers lay ahead. The ships of empire were thresholds to the New World; monsters, mermaid visions and madness awaited for many aboard. From the swift-rotating glass globe of Louise Manifold's Black Carousel (2009), the silhouettes of black ships, black seas, are projected unto the walls and ceilings at high speed, fast and roiling. Shadow-waves roll over Bird Boat (2009), a small, many-masted ship, sprouting black feathers at the bow. The sculpture looks like a toy, which might have been played by the children of captains and buccaneers. Manifold's Gothic aesthetic reminds the viewer that many Victorian sailors never returned from global sojourns, in the pursuit of colonial utopias.

Todnautberg (2008) by Dennis Del Favero is also the name of a hill in Germany's Black Forest. In 1966, philosopher Martin Heidegger invited the poet Paul Celan to his chalet here. Celan's parents had died in the Holocaust, while he himself had been interned. Heidegger, on the other hand, had endorsed National Socialism in 1933; that same year, he had conducted Nazi indoctrination sessions at the chalet. After the meeting, Celan wrote Todnautberg, a cryptic poem described by one critic as "un poème exténué, pour tout dire, déçu" (2) ("an exhausted, even disappointed poem"), whose title is a grim play on the place's name: At the Mountain of Death. In the video, two men pass each other, eyes closed, within a labyrinthine forest. Their journeys are separate, but they keep passing each other. In a voice-over monologue, a fictional Celan addresses Heidegger: "In that dream, I heard you say you were sorry." Heidegger does not answer, just as he had never explicitly addressed his flirtation with Nazism. "You said, I was wrong, did you say that?" Hauntingly, the frame dissolves and solidifies, from Black Forest to archival scenes - marches, bonfires, a concentration camp - and back again, to the Forest, to the maze of History. "Where people were herded into real chambers" the narrator whispers. Footage of German children bracket the narrative - the speech of the innocent has been muted; in the silence, the absence of an apology, remain unanswered questions.

California, modernism, Nazism - these have all been utopias shared by masses of people. Eventually, except for a few stalwarts, these have been subject to decay or destruction. The question of entropy haunts all utopias. In Galway's heterotopia, uncertainty lies ahead for all aboard. With radical difference beckons radical encounters - discoveries of the hitherto unimaginable. Mulrennan has organized a thoughtful and immersive exploration of utopia. These melancholic encounters remind the viewer that the utopian impulse continues to haunt modernity, indeed, human creativity itself.

-Phillina Sun

1) Hetherington, Kevin, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopias and Social Ordering (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), viii.

2) Joris, Pierre, "Celan/Heidegger: Translation at the Mountain of Death."