Category: Bounce Fund

The so-called utopia is a project that falls between a group show and a process-focused residency. Taking place on the 27th
floor of the Millbank Tower, six residents will produce works that take the form of site-specific reconfigurations across
seven days. Starting as detectable and traditionally displayed productions, the work will morph into more covert and subtle
interventions that respond to the function of the building in which they are displayed—an office block. Unlike a traditional
‘white cube’ style show, the work seeks to intervene with the space it exists within. Though the artist’s interferences are not
technically restricted, they are in many ways bound by the context of the site where the work will exist. As curator Rory
Bakker-Marshall foresees “Despite all the pleasures of making and discussion, our freedom for movement and
imagination is bound inside an emptied office, haunted by the fantasy behind its creation.” The works cannot be
produced in isolation, so rather than competing with the history of the Millbank Centre, the artists choose to draw inferences
from it.

The exhibition takes its title from a 1976 book of the same name, originally written by Swiss Sociologist Albert Meister
(writing under the pseudonym Gustave Affeulpin) and called La soi-disant utopie du centre beubourg in its original French.
The book recounts the fictional creation of a 70-storey alternative Centre Beaubourg, underneath the existing Parisian
cultural centre. There, each floor was inhabited by a different group with varying creative outputs, in isolation from the
outside world but not from one another. Questions raised by Meister included how groups may exist, operate, and perhaps
interfere with one another in this imaginary “utopia,” bringing into question not just what the nature of culture is, but how
the shape and architecture of a space dictate what happens within it. Moreover, the influence is mainly taken from the book’s
2007 interpretation by Luca Frei, and the English adaptation that reflects the process of transferring the ideas from one cultural framework and era to another and the artist’s subjective role within it.

Our so-called utopia then situates itself as a very loose re-interpretation of a re-interpretation, with physical consequences. When Meister was writing, in 1970s Paris, the
book inspired small ‘beaubourgs’ across Europe, taking place in apartments, factories and disused offices. Our utopia then
sits in a lineage of other reinterpreted so-called utopias, with one of its primary interests being the time and duration spent in
Studio 27, in addition to the six residents, inviting visiting artists, writers, and performers to contribute and participate.

Accompanying exhibition text written by Lucy Broome.