Impossible Utopia
Throughout history, people have designed utopias, perfect worlds that aren’t exactly real and yet that can serve to illuminate real needs. Contemplating utopias restores and reinvigorates us by helping us to focus on the what things could, and might, one day be like.
In the summer of 2016, a few days after the controversial Brexit referendum result was announced, I decided to create a new body of work reflecting on the UK’s south east border, a vast space of water called the English Channel. The referendum was questionable with more than 3 million European residents in the UK - including myself - denied the right to vote and I wanted to find a way to address the significance of the vote in a wide context.
My intention was to use the moonlight, the stars and the sea that separates Great Britain from the rest of Europe to create large scale symbolic pieces that would provoke debate on contemporary issues such as migration, the future of our planet, the power of politics and the implications of the Brexit vote on all Europeans living in the UK.
The project was my way to try to process and convert something, which, in my view, was negative into a positive experience. In historical terms, our ancestors used the stars and moon as navigation tools to guide them through the night on their long voyages. My own grandparents crossed the Atlantic in old style ships over 100 years ago, from Germany & Austria to South America, looking for a new life.
We “humans” do n
