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from experience itself, lmowledge and action brought together so that they
become indistinguishable, insurrection emptying into constitution. He used
these thoughts to preface his Droit de cite. Another book for the Station.
It is simple. We use utopia as a catalyst, a concept most useful as fuel. We
leave the complete definition of utopia to others. We meet to pool our efforts,
motivated by a need to change the landscape outside and inside, a need to think,
a need to integrate the work of the artist, the intellectual and manual labourers
that we are into a larger kind of community, another kind of economy, a bigger
conversation, another state of being. You could call this need a hunger.
Dare one rewrite a sentence by Brecht? Something we need is missing. The
man who, seventy years ago, wrote 'Art follows reality' would surely not mind.
Let us then take these words and press on. We need the words, old words and
new words, we need the dance, we need the sausage, and still we need more. We
have started, we meet in the Utopia Station, we start out again. The Station
becomes a place to gather our starting points temporarily. It is primarily for this
reason it resists capture and summary as a single image. Or is it the image of
open possibility? The image of mixed use? Many things will happen there. And
they will spark others.
Think of the Station as a field of starting points, many starting points being
brought and offered by many different people. Some will bring objects now,
others later. Each present and future contributor to the Station is being asked to
do a poster for use in the Station and beyond: wherever it can hang, it can go. A
paper trail for once goes forward. New posters continue to be added. In this way
the Utopia Station produces images, even as it does not start with one. And a
loose community assembles. It develops its own internal points of coherence,
which shift with the times, as conversations and debates do.
Each person making a poster has been asked to make a statement of at least
one and up to two hundred words. Independent of one another the statements
collect. Stuart Hall and Zeigam Azizov elaborate upon a proposition: the world
has to be made to mean. The bittersweet baked into hope, writes Nancy Spero.
Pash Buzari sent a poem where darkness is dialled. The Raqs Media Collective
calls utopia a hearing aid. This probably will not work. Jimmie Durham cites the
Cherokee, and adds that the 'probably' keeps people active. There will be
hundreds of statements like these in the end. They will branch out. As they do
certain figures begin to repeat. Ships and songs and flags, two times potatoes,
two times Sisyphus, figures familiar from the discussion of utopia forty years
ago, but they have been assimilated rather than cited. Utopia becomes the secret
garden whose doors can be opened again. Utopia becomes the catalyst that
burns and returns. None of us can say we begin from scratch.
These actitivities imply an activism. For many who come to the Station, its
188//CRITICALAND CURATORIAL POSITIONS