Utopia
Photography between dreams and visions
Lebenszüge
(train's life)
What direction-changing moment in your life did you let pass? When did you think in retrospect, "I didn't make the right decision"? Are you still on the path to your own personal utopia? Have you arrived where you really wanted to be?
Sometimes life reminds me of a big train station. For me, the many trains going in different directions are a symbol for all kinds of life plans.
You yourself have the power to choose which train you get on in order to get a little closer to your utopia. Maybe it goes in the wrong direction sometimes. But you always move forward, no matter what you choose.
And despite the increasing number of passing trains in the course of a lifetime, the missed decisions, it becomes easier over time not to dwell on the unused opportunities. The life train choice made is, in retrospect, a single individual reality.
Alejandro Montoya, 2021
Of visual escapes and visionary apparitions
In times of pandemics and climate catastrophes, a growing gap between rich and poor, ongoing armed conflicts and global refugee movements, foresighted views seem to tend primarily in dystopian dystopian directions.
In addition to documentary-critical stocktaking, however, it is precisely hopeful outlooks and visions, which are intended to expand our perception in a constructive way and to stimulate a creative exchange with the now.
Over the course of one year, the participants of this project course have approached the various aspects of the concept of utopia and translated their personal confrontation with the topic into photographic interpretations.
The focus was on our ideas of of ideal and/or future living environments in the area of tension between fiction and the present. The resulting works resolve in the most diverse ways part of the search for meaning, which has always preoccupied people and perhaps also drives them them to make pictures.
Visionary role models, found or translated into everyday architectures, gloomy from the future to the final appropriation of built living space by an omnivorous nature, visual escapes into dream worlds on gray concrete, shadowy grey concrete, shadowy appearances of interpersonal distance and cautious unmaskings in the search for the true self offer varied perspectives on this ever topical theme.
It is left up to the viewer to perhaps also gain playfulness from the photographic visions and to discover beauty in the unfinished, before our future has become the present.
Ebba Dangschat, February 2021