Lea Guldditte Hestelund
Soft Utopia, 2018
Soloshow at Eduardo Secci Gallery, Florence
Curated by Irene Campolmi
There are different ways to contrast the global political dystopia threatening contemporary society. One strategy is to resist by creating protest forms that denounce the dangers of noxious political visions. Another is to radically imagine alternative utopias that only exist as futuristic projections into an extraordinary spatial and temporal dimension. Utopias are ambiguous by nature: they propose a structured alternative vision to oppose dystopias, but because they are still ‘in fieri', they have a soft, sleek ‘consistency' recalling that of the dreams. In historical times where the future is under threat, envisioning utopias is an exercise – or rather, a survival strategy - to conceive a different world and to shape new sensorial and ideological structures that give form to alternative socio-political visions.