UTOPIA? – Building a scenographic resistance

What do you imagine when you hear the word ‘utopia’? Do you see paradise on earth? Or hyper modernist glass structures?

From Bucky Balls[1] to La Guin’s Anarres[2] and Urban Planning[3] to post war brutalism, Utopia has long conjured an image of a particular space, a physical space with its own rules and appearances. The examples given are both real and imagined, from a philosophy that architecture and the built world can alter the way we as humans interact with one another. Yet utopia also exists as a speculative future: in other words, it exists in the mind. Utopias, whether as a book or as an ideal, exist in the quest for a better world, one free of discrimination and inequality. The Utopian ideal has been central to much of my scenographic work. The project ‘signals form Uranus’ for example was conceived with the ideal of creating a magical if surreal landscape, one born out of the concept of love (It was valentine’s day!) and the other in terms of creating an ‘alien’ landscape away from what would normally be expected. I used a red womb to encompass the room, using drapery and coverings to create a state of temporal distance from the previously white walls of the former art gallery (fig 1). I can look to a wide variety of literature on where my scenographic taste comes from and why it inhabits the (im)materiality of constructed space.

It is an interesting thought that I am interested in producing ‘Atmospheres’ and ‘emotions’ via the manipulation of the physical materials, yet as Bohme[4], a prominent thinker on the subject of atmosphere notes, there may seem to be something rather incongruent about the very notion of producing atmospheres, because production ordinarily signifies the manufacture of something tangible, whereas atmosphere is ordinarily associated with something airy or indistinct. However, Bohme points to the stage set as a historic example of how the manufacturing of atmosphere cut across the concrete and the immaterial in the production of the experience of something real. Hence why I would term my work as ‘scenographic’ rather than using some other term such as that of an interior designer or interior architect.

I would say that I am interested in using imagined utopias as a way of theorising the creating of safer spaces and inclusive communities. My utopia would be obliquely queer, feminist, anti-racist and de-colonialist. Detractors would be quick to say that having such a strong ideology to begin with is quite the opposite of inclusive, but I would be quick to disagree: the conversation is always there to be had but must not be neither at the expense of another person nor demean another’s own right to be heard. As the Rostone collective[5] points out, safe spaces are inherently paradoxical. Cultivating them includes foregrounding social differences and binaries (safe–unsafe, inclusive–exclusive) as well as recognizing the porosity of such binaries. One of the reasons I prefer the term safer spaces, is in recognition that no place is totally safe.

Still, we as architects and designers intentionally shape the experience of, and emotional response to, a place through the material environment, seeking with various degrees of success to affect people’s moods and guide their behaviour for aesthetic, artistic, utilitarian or commercial reasons (Bille et al). So, in at my most extreme, I am manipulating ephemeral structures to manipulate my audience into feeling a sense of safety, inclusion, and comfort. I don’t see this as a negative thing; I see it as a much-needed approach in creating radical, alternative, and non-commercial ways of experiencing social interaction. Not just me, but everyone who partakes in space making is altering the ephemeral attributes to it. Claiming autonomy and creating spaces where it can be exercised is a relational process – it is deeply contextual and is shaped by the time and place in which the experiment takes place, as well as the circumstances of the people involved (Brown and Pickerill 2009).[6]

So, I come to the intersection of concepts of safety, inclusion, architecture, and scenography. As I am writing this, the world is consumed by the corona-crisis and such experiments are put on hold (in a physical capacity at least). For many, this has led to a time of reflection and realisation that the world is not and will not be the same. Since the lockdown in Europe began in the 2nd week of March, I have had to throw any hope of achieving my own dreams as a venue designer out the window (for the time being at least). After much self-pity, I began to realise that I could write my thesis on the topics with which co-vid 19 presents us. With this in mind, I was still in a quandary of what to do and how, so I began the task of gathering primary data by interviewing friends and colleagues in the artistic world to ascertain what their thoughts are on the current situation. I had the feeling I needed to talk to a lot of people and see if, after gathering some first hand data, I could provide my own opinions on what is to come and how we as cultural activists can prepare.

In my view we can begin that preparation by imagining radical utopias and what we must do to achieve that. I recall Florian Fischer suggesting in a May 2020 interview that if everyone walked on the earth assuming others kindness instead of being scared of potential threats, we might see a very different world order arise. When I asked him further, he asked me to imagine a world where everyone believed the best in each other instead of fearing for violence, abuse, or harassment: I encourage you to do the same. This world is all too easy to imagine when you do not suffer violence at the hands of others. As Morrison (2017) notes in the conclusion to her dissertation Decolonizing Utopia, “that inability to imagine a better future is ingrained in us by Western power structures; that utopia is so often considered a derogatory term on all sides of the political spectrum, that to talk of utopia is to talk of unrealistic dreaming.”[7] Morrison continues, saying that this inability “is especially dystopian for people of colour and colonized peoples in the West, those on whose backs the utopian promises of colonialism was built (and the new forms of oppression that continue to sustain the false utopia of capitalism)”.

This is exemplified by the current riots all over the Divided States, sparked by the police murder of unarmed black man George Floyd. Such extra-judicial killings are unfortunately regular fare in the US, as well as in many other countries: from Eric Garner, murdered on Staten Island in 2014, to Marc Duggan, murdered in Tottenham in 2011, such events are often the final straw in mass civil unrest amongst communities who are victimised in a campaign of premeditated and systemic institutional racism. Each of these 3 events resulted in mass protest and rioting, spilling over from years of mistreatment and victimisation. As a trans person, my poisoning with dealing with law enforcement and various state institutions is also undeniably discriminatory: a 2015 US-wide survey[8] on trans rights showed two thirds of trans individuals were mistreated by police in the last year, to say the least. A harrowing quote from the LGBT in Britain survey shows that 79 present of hate crime against trans people is never reported for fear of discrimination within the police itself. My conclusion is that yes to dream of utopia is radical, but it will remain an unattainable dream if we do not consider the steps we as activists must take to get to such a dream. I argue that to dream of utopia is to dream of resistance against an unjust system, to dream of power against the neo-colonialist elites.

The antithesis of Utopia is Dystopia, a genre which many people link with Utopia despite their very different purposes in our system. In my view, Dystopia is a way to keep the oppressed in their place, to remind them of suffering that is already present, whereas to imagine utopia is to imagine resistance, it is to imagine a world free of capitalism and neo-colonialist imperialism. I see it as a tool of activism, for hope is a powerful thing. I dare say it is inherently radical, even more so when speculative futures are built from the perspective of the oppressed, for as Morrison (2017)[9] continues, “To imagine utopia is to take a step toward preventing the loss of those radical dissidents that the capitalist system wants to see dead.”

REFERENCES

[1] https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/geodesic-domes

[2]https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/7/bierman7art.htm

[3]  Meyerson, M. (1961). Utopian Traditions and the Planning of Cities. Daedalus, 90(1), 180-193. Retrieved May 30, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/20026647

[4] Bohme, G., 2013. The art of the stage set as a paradigm for an aesthetics of atmospheres. Ambian. Int. J. Sens. Environ. Archit. Urban Space. http://ambiances.revues.org/315 (accessed 31.05.20.).

[5] The Roestone Collective ( 2014), Safe Space: Towards a Reconceptualization, Antipode, 46, pages 1346– 1365, doi: 10.1111/anti.12089

[6] Brown, G. and Pickerill, J. (2009) ‘Space for Emotion in the Spaces of Activism’, Emotion, Space and Society 2(1): 24–35.

[7] We can see this by the rampant production of dystopic futures in mass media, think, 2012, The day after tomorrow, Zombieland, etc. it is far easier for us to imagine the dystopic because of the chains of capitalist thought.

[8] https://medium.com/@TransEquality/8-changes-transgender-people-need-from-law-enforcement-44c3d7c03966

[9] Morrison, M. I. (2017). Decolonizing Utopia: Indigenous Knowledge and Dystopian Speculative Fiction. UC Riverside. ProQuest ID: Morrison_ucr_0032D_13200. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5xw9frc. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0f0152f