Not utopia, but hope
Attempts to create a new world
MúzeumCafé 27.
Two exhibitions which ran until the middle of January – one in Budapest’s Ludwig Museum, the other at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin – had more in common than might first appear. Both the Yona Friedman Retrospective and Tomás Saraceno’s huge bubble installation tried to reinterpret two principal concepts, architecture and utopia. In the case of the Friedman Retrospective a museum was the space for communicating analysis, understanding and knowledge, where a visitor could learn about theory via experience, while Saraceno turned the space into an aesthetic notion, creating contemporary art installations in a museum. The aim of the Yona Friedman Retrospective was to present the architect’s oeuvre through its key concepts. Saraceno returned to an earlier installation complementing it with his own project, the forms of Cloud City based on the movement of clouds. Prior to these projects they had both participated in the central exhibition of Making Worlds at the Venice Biennale in 2009. For his Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition Saraceno created a ‘dream world’ of some twenty floating balloon and web models, as well as a hanging garden. A major aspect of Tomás Saraceno’s works is reflected in his private life, namely living without restrictions. Just as the bubbles float and can be easily moved as homes in the future, so the artist experiences mobility in his chosen place of residence, Frankfurt. The international airport in Frankfurt is a symbol of boundless mobility. Hence another of Saraceno’s artistic concepts bears the title Air-Port-City. Mobility and homelessness in a positive sense constitute an intrinsic part of the bubble utopia. In his polychromatic and transparent aerial cities everyone can freely move between the units of residence, which imitate the movement of clouds.