[spectre] FW: / / A R T - e - F A C T / 02

[darko fritz]

/ /  A R T - e - F A C T
/ /  STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE



Dear All,

The first issue of ART-e-FACT, the online magazine instigated in Zagreb,
Croatia, exposes the topic of illegal immigration in and around Europe
through artworks, interviews, reports and other writings. These materials
were developed largely through the collaborative and multi-disciplinary
project, Motel Jezevo.
In a similar way we are now developing the second issue around a discussion
of the ideas and perceptions of Utopia. Our approach to this topic is
outlined below, and we invite you to contact us with artwork or writing
proposals that are rethinking and reshaping the subject of Utopia in the
21st century.

Nada Beros, Editor-in-Chief
Zarko Paic, Guest Editor
You can visit us online at: http://artefact.mi2.hr/
or contact us at: info at artefact.mi2.hr






/  U T O P I A  / 


Zarko Paic

THE NEW CALL OF UTOPIA
/ Art-e-fact: a text of invitation for cooperation /

With the theme simply entitled UTOPIA, Art-e-fact wishes to provoke an
interaction between theoreticians and visual artists by posing a set of
questions related to contemporary society/art. A self-confident artist in
the age of conceptual-performative "upheavals" of the boundaries of social
perversions of power (globalization, symbolic and real violence of capital
on living labour as a subjugated substance-subject of history, bio-power of
technology, terrorism and war as "transformational logic" of the new
cartographies of the world) no longer has a WALL of monolith ideology in
front of them. 

Can the utopian "being" and "thinking" from a deficiency of utopian
perspectives of all our transitional, post-industrial, postmodern societies
of general apathy not end up in the uncritical blindness of one ideology for
the creation of "real" hope for the success of one¹s own utopia? How much
longer can art as the new image of sub-version of social and cultural
boundaries be outside the clear form of ideological discourse? Who are the
relevant contemporary thinkers of utopia at all? Why does every form of
opposition to the governing neoliberal system of imperial globalization have
no real utopian perspective? How to oppose the international movement of
"cosmopolitan internationalism of capital" more than the abstract non-power
of the resurrection of the icons of the student revolution of ¹68 (NGO,
civil society, zones of cosmopolitan culture of non-violence and peace)?

The new call of utopia no longer has a reason for escaping to a deserted
island. There is no reason for the late discovery of any kind of eastern
exoticism. In the global world of the one and same ideology ­neoliberal
fundamentalism of capital, power, new religions of pleasure ­ which now
assumes the contours of the eternal, universal and "natural" civilization ­
the last escape has already been carried out. This is the escapism of spirit
of unbearably shallow hybridity of culture and the so-called individual
salvation in New Age ideology of the Age of Aquarius. Utopia today? Is that
not real ground for live criticism, the irreducibility of anything
previously utopian issued in the name of the future as the history of
salvation (communism, anarchism, libertinism and last but not least ­
utopian socialism) which in the 20th century unavoidably transformed itself
into its opposite?

How to envision utopia, and not run away from society¹s real
repression/depression into a ghetto or exile for fantastic outsiders?