Open gallery in Lisbon
During the month of August 2017 Filipa Reis and I held an open studio, Utoparium, in Mute Gallery in Lisbon to develop our ongoing project. We invited anyone who felt like it to join us in the studio to view and contribute to our work in progress and share with us their own utopias and thoughts.
Check out our website here!
More Background
In August 2016, Filipa and I met and began a long conversation about the idea of home, the connection between our identity and our home, and how we imagine our ideal utopia/”(no) place”. Like KnoWhere, the word utopia has a double meaning, it can be either a “good place” or a “no place”. From Thomas More’s Utopia (England, 1516) it has always been unclear if Utopia was describing an ideal place or criticizing More’s own reality.
Our conversation took a life of its own, and we spent the past year researching utopias and asking people to describe how they would design their ideal place.
These imaginary utopias, that enable us to live the way we want to live, combine loose pieces from our past living experiences, our contexts, our homes, our personal experiences and our vision of the world and humanity. Throughout time, descriptions of utopias have been a reflection of the current state of the world, and we’ve been challenging ourselves to understand the context of these “no places” and ways of being in our current world.