Artists: Mika Savela and Henrik Drufva (Selim Project)
As an on-going research, exhibition and publication project, Proxima Utopia plays with subtitle “a world atlas of utopias, to be considered in the era of post-everything”. Perhaps following a cycle (and anticipation) of global crisis developing today on many fronts, the project is based on the notion that once again, we seem to be drawn to utopias. However, as our understanding of past and present modernities has become multi-centered and more complex, we are witnessing several deviant ways in how future societies are being pursued. Proxima Utopia builds up a project for an atlas that seeks to provide speculative cartographies, fictional collections and iconography for these developments. It is not as such a "mappa mundi", consisting of everything that we currently know of the world, but more of a design-led inquiry into the "other" directions that global development might take – with or without the benevolent and harmonious past understanding of utopias. While not potentially desirable, the scenes seem yet plausible, deriving from current global politics, power relations, economy, surveillance, the post-internet and the looming ecological changes – the real contexts of future art, design and architecture.
*Supported by Embassy of Finland, Sofia and Arts Promotion Centre Finland’s