In Between Utopia and Failure
25.11-09.12.20
Online programme with Herman Asselberghs, Lietje Bauwens & Wouter De Raeve, Jef Cornelis, Vlad Ionescu, Ludovic Lamant, Gery Leloutre, Maria Tarantino, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu, Emma van der Put, Mona Vǎtǎmanu & Florin Tudor.
The exhibition Omnia Communia Deserta by Mona Vǎtǎmanu & Florin Tudor offers a reflection on architecture in relation to ideologies, politics, and public space. Following on from these problematics, the public programme In Between Utopia & Failure aims to resituate the issues present in the exhibition within the local context of Brussels. Throughout a live-stream series of events — including film screenings and talks — the programme will address the Belgian capital’s socio-political situation, ranging from its relationship to the past and its intensive post-war urban development, to its inherently political and international character.
In both cases of Bucharest and Brussels, the prevailing powers in the 1960s and 1970s and their ideologies made a lasting imprint on the urban landscapes, driven by a similar desire for modernity to erase past developments. What do we inherit from the ruins of these utopias? How can we apprehend the chasm between the grandiloquence of their origins and their fall? How are we to behave within these spaces today? What progress is still possible? Over the course of four chapters, the programme will endeavor to rethink and discuss the concept of modernity in a decompartmentalized and global manner, using artistic, philosophical, and sociological proposals as a framework.
This programme was conceived in partnership with ARGOS, Centre for audiovisual arts in Brussels and with the support of the Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie (VGC).
Read here the full programme
