Running for Your Life: Concrete Utopia

It won’t be up much longer, Concrete Utopia. Jan. 13 it comes down.

A part of the world, a moment in time. Currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art.

Could you find Sarajevo on a map?

Where is Ljubljana?

What borders Serbia to the north?

Split, Croatia? Dubrovnik?

Then there is the library in Pristina, Kosovo … and Ernst Bloch’s definition of utopia, “a hopeful, future-oriented process in a perpetual state of emergence.”

Back in the day (I hesitate to use my father’s phrase, “Back in my day …” but) we’re talking the Third Way, a living socialism, however imperfect, with bilingual signs (English being one) across the so-called Balkan states of Yugoslavia.

In 1984, the year of the Sarajevo Olympics (I have the pin), I was twenty-eight and impressionable, odd the Orwell string, one I’ve not plucked until now.

Age of the concrete – shown in now vintage photos – limns the limits of theory when it comes to the manifold possibilities of disruption through social – not capital – gain.

I look about me here, at the people attending Concrete Utopia, and think:

The immaculate truth of an idea, so last century.

And what, do tell, feeds the dreams of today’s twenty-eight year olds?

Next: Running for Your Life: New Yorker?






















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