THE NON-PLACE IS NOT UTOPIA
Iván de la Nuez
1. The non-place is not utopia… even if some unprincipled readers of Moro or Campanella insist on this idea, overlooking the fact that in utopian books redemption is doubtful (and oppression abounds). Those imagined cities that exert their power of magnetisation from a corner of the world do not propose liberation but perfection. More than a project designed for the well-being of the future, they act as a placebo for the malaise of the present.
2. Five centuries later, individuals are frantically confronting even more widespread inconvenient situations. Today we are swinging between the non-place of digital life and the non-place of the physical experience of displacement. Between a virtual asepsis and a traumatic -aromatic- human movement. Between the computer and the open boat, the channels through which the world is drained are multiplied. Between the inconvenience of mankind defeated on a coastline and the inconvenience that strikes when it attempts to reappear on the other shore.
3. More than utopian, these conditions are "atopic", for they reflect what we could describe as an "allergic" malaise. No longer an eager search for a territory that doesn't exist (the "there is no such place" that is expressed by utopia), but specific confirmation of existing space. The works by Hugo Orlandini hover between these inconveniences, continuously illuminating the abrupt collision that takes place at its extremes.
4. Power and Home. Escape and Delete. Control and Help... Computer keyboards, whose instructions we possess, are not only a vehicle for literal descriptions of malaise (unease). They constitute per se the actual story. A plan for advancing through the non-place. Orlandini unites the tactile and the virtual -the flight and its description- through a ritual procedure. A work that is simultaneously an itinerary. An invocation but also a map. The various pieces in the exhibition are chapters in a story and also provisions for navigating (in all senses of the term) the world.
5. At the start of the digital age, virtual life (from Second Life to video games) imitated "real life" in order to change it and, at the end of the day, make it grow. Here, however, the opposite is the case: reality is the continuation of our virtuality, but from a decreasing condition. We must also point out that what is lost in the ether is gained in the street. What we lose in illusion we recover in weight (the benches in parks that are "made of keyboards"). All that we have achieved in the present endangers any future possibilities.
6. Clic toys: models for arming repression and evidence of a certain infantilisation of contemporary life. Rather than because of its tragedy, the world of toys is compared to the world of migrations because of its childishness -the second childhood of the displaced person, obliged to learn to talk, to walk, to eat or behave. "Fortune's fool" we call them here, some of them gadgets, others advertisements. In the final analysis, we don't solve the jigsaw puzzle, we are just the bits that others piece together and break up.
7. The greatest dream of success is usually just the sweet science. So, in spite of appearances, the material of a golden veneer is not that of champions but the thermal sheet that awaits us after a sea crossing.
8. The Hugo Orlandini exhibition contains a moment for catastrophes, a certain something that interrupts a peaceful, almost perfect existence (utopian even) of a sheltered everyday life. In this case Orlandini seems to follow Goethe's imperative, "when I am overcome by fear I conjure up an image", that illuminates a chapter of City of Panic, the book that Paul Virilio dedicates to the relationship between terrorism and the urbs. In this work the terrorist attack is an act that mimics the effects of a natural disaster. Of different origins, they both share the devastating result, the consternation before the impact, the unexpected irruption in everyday life. Terrorist attacks and natural catastrophes have produced a culture of the disaster that covers Godzilla and manga, Christopher Draeger and Thomas Hirschhorn. While the end of history has turned out to be impossible, there is nothing that denies the end of the world as a possibility.
9. There is a moment for neon. The moment for certain advertising. And an evident anachronism: the "I am" under which all newcomers are announced is actually saying "I was", in an advertisement that combines the curricular and the promotional, a certain pornography and the labour market.
10. The non-place is not utopia. Okay, but… what about the place? A cell in Guantánamo closes this project, in the double sense that it concludes and at once cloisters it. Guantánamo as a reality and as an extreme metaphor of closed space; 49 square kilometres in which the vestiges of communism meet a naval base with neo-colonial echoes. Islamist terrorism and the tortures of liberal democracy. The Nobel Prize in Literature (that places it in Harold Pinter's speech) and the Golden Lion of the Berlin film festival (awarded to The Road to Guantánamo by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross). The radical art of Bansky (who places it in a Disney World parody with his installation entitled Big Thunder Mountain Railroad) and even the spy thriller (Frederick Forsyth's The Afghan, Dan Fesperman's The Prisoner of Guantánamo). Today the word "Guantánamo" is more than the place name of a degradation that refers to the shelter of various geopolitical quarantines, it is also conclusive evidence to determine whether an artist is able to play without marked cards.
11. For Hugo Orlandini the non-place is not utopia. The fact that precisely Guantánamo should bring this exhibition to its close seems to confirm that the place... is not utopia either.