I photographed The Spirit of Utopia not as an event, but as a condition. As something that had already lived a life.
By the time a photographer arrives, architecture and art are never innocent. They have already been imagined, argued over, funded, compromised, built, inhabited, misunderstood, loved, neglected, adapted. What remains is not the pure intention, but the residue of intention. The marks left by use. The slight misalignments between what was hoped for and what actually occurred.
This is what draws me in, continuously, is not the optimism of the opening night, but the quieter, more truthful moment when the work has settled into itself. When the lived reality begins to speak.
Art and Architecture are a vessel. Containers for lives, dreams, gestures of belief. They are made in moments of conviction, often collective, sometimes naïve, always incomplete. We build because we want to believe that space can improve the quality of our thinking, the generosity of our conversations, the dignity of our labour. We make rooms for celebration, for learning, for making, for being together. We make them in the hope that something better might happen inside.
Standing in those spaces, camera in hand, I am acutely aware that none of this could ever have been fully anticipated. We can dream, but we cannot forecast use. We can propose futures, but we cannot control how they will be inhabited. The best architecture, the best art, does not pretend otherwise. It accepts that it is provisional. That it will be adapted, misused, reinterpreted, worn down and built over again.
What interested me now is how it has aged. How the works carry the weight of time. Ideas that once felt speculative now feel alarmingly practical. Others feel fragile, almost tender.
The question posed by Ernst Bloch lingers: What are we waiting for? Perhaps the uncomfortable answer is that we are waiting for the future to prove us wrong, or right, in ways we never imagined.
That, perhaps, is the real spirit of utopia.
Theaster Gates | Pedro Reyes | Wayward Plants | Claire Pentecost | ulieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle | Superflex | Yto Barrada | Peter Liversidge | Ha Za Vu Zu | Ostengruppe
Curated by curated by Iwona Blazwick OBE, Daniel F. Herrmann, Kirsty Ogg, Sofia Victorino and Nayia Yiakoumaki.
The exhibition was supported by Whitechapel Gallery Future Fund, with additional support from Outset Contemporary Art Fund; SAHA, Istanbul; the Danish Arts Council Committee for International Visual Arts; Embassy of Mexico in the United Kingdom; Embassy of the United States, UK; The Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design and London Metropolitan University. With thanks to Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Lisson Gallery, London, Pace, London, White Cube, London and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.
