Possible utopias

The philosopher Gaston Bachelard said that man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need, and that utopia is his natural destiny. Thomas More published Utopia in 1516, and thus coined the Greek-derived neologism so beloved by Surrealists, particularly André Breton, due to its connections with dreams and desires. There are two subjects resulting from “utopia”: a “utopian” who is seen as a dreamer living desires as reality, and a “utopianist” or social reformer whose ambition is to establish a different society. The dreamers are said to be fantasists and the reformers fanatics. At times the two sides coincide, as in the case of Fourier.

Pep Admetlla is an artist who dreams up and designs a utopia of a better society searching for an ideal of concept and form, made possible by the uniting of several disciplines, after a complex work process that verges on madness. The process of research into the total artwork, often going beyond the final work, converts his projects into philosophical essays that are expressed via text and the organic visuality of a totalising artistic concept, fusing literature, architecture, sculpture, philosophy and visual thought. The result is a magnificent book of images in search of the total artwork.

Utopia is always present in his projects which in the end can be defined as a cross between sculpture, public space and architecture, just like the more significant avant-gardes of the 20th century when they sought a new man for the new historical age. Thus, the avantgarde provided new models for architectural utopias which steered this shift towards an intersection of languages. This was especially true in the Russian avant-garde with projects such as Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and also Kurt Schwitters’s Merz Column, a reconstruction of which can be seen today in his studio in Hannover, which crosses various strata and levels to open doors onto sculpture being both architecture and transitable space. At the same time, new contemporary examples have acted as a driving force forging new relationships between architecture and sculpture, such as the work of Gordon Matta- Clark.

Contemporary architecture has developed into a space for the reflection on and the experiencing of form. It is increasingly distanced from its function and has become an object of symbolic functionality. One only has to look at the great auteur buildings, such as those by Zaha Haid, Peter Zumthor or Jean Nouvel, to cite but a few examples, to see that architectural space has been transformed into a place for experiencing form, a feature already present in Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion.

Pep Admetlla makes utopia possible. His artistic projects, apparently impossible according to the strictest interpretation of the Proun constructions by the utopians of the Russian avant-garde, are paradoxically transitable sculptures which help connect public space, providing new lighting points and unusual perspectives, making today’s flâneur a user of public space distanced from the consumerism and merchandise mentioned by Walter Benjamin in his study “Paris, capital of the 19th century” in the Arcades Project. Admetlla brings us closer, with his sculptural/ urbanistic projects incorporated into public space, to the myth of the ideal city where homo urbanus discovers his ego, allowing us as well to discover the other and cooperate in the regeneration of society. It is, perhaps, a machine-like conception of public and urban space which, while perhaps not habitable, is transitable, introducing values of modernity such as perspective, the horizon, geometry, the primacy of the individual, and urbanity. This is most evident in a user who, as in his own city, Girona, strolls through the past of stone architecture, archaeology of an age that Pep Admetlla disrupts with a new age of iron, as in his latest project, shown at the Venice Biennale of Architecture: Entre cos i enigma. Arquitectura dels sentits; a bridge between Sant Pere de Galligants and the Paseo Arqueológico, a possible utopia and example of a fusion between art and science awaiting realisation.