The first part of this work in progress was shown at Espacio Valverde gallery >>
This project is a dialogue with some of the most prominent artists of the 60s and 70s, to — by contrast with that time of vitality and hope — initiate a reflection on the current difficulty in imagining the future we want and in facing the challenges ahead.
In recent decades, we have witnessed the emergence of a kind of timelessness, of a kind of continuous digital present. The future, once imagined as a promising time, is now seen as a dystopian scenario. Popular series such as Black Mirror, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Fence, The 100, Colony… the list is endless, make us fear and see the future as a threat. Consequently, in the face of a bleak future, we are left with only the hope of an endless present, thus perpetuating the status quo and nullifying our will to conceptualize a better future, and to move forward as a society.
The decade of the late 60s and early 70s was an era marked by continuous experimentation, the expansion of limits, and overflowing energy that broke barriers and transformed everyday life. In the conviction that the best was yet to come, a better future was imagined, an ideal of a freer, fairer, and more beautiful life. (Labrador, 2017).
This series of images invite us to turn our gaze toward that future conceived as possible, but which never fully materialized, what British thinker Mark Fisher defines as Lost Futures.
Outstanding artists of that time such as Esther Ferrer, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Javier Mariscal, Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, Angels Ribé, Luis Gordillo, Antoni Muntadas, Fina Miralles, Fernando Arrabal, Antoni Miralda, Zush, Soledad Sevilla, Carmen Calvo, Marisa González… make us tune in with the expectations and hopes of a time they lived in the forefront of change, with attitudes and practices that were the breeding ground of a new sensibility that anticipated that imagined future.
This work uses the past to invite us to reflect on our present. It establishes a bridge between two temporalities, not as an empty revival, without reference to the current reality, but to remind us that it is possible to imagine a better future because there was a time when it was done. In short, “Eutopia” is memory projected into the future.