About |
Ideal Spaces is an art and research project that aims to experience spaces of social and imaginative relevance. To be presented at the Venice Architectural Biennale 2016, it is not only about architecture but about social dreaming and imagination, expressed in ‘ideal’ spaces with their impacts on architecture, art, and human hopes.
We tried to show this via a combination of presenting ideal city spaces, active participation of the visitors molding their own spaces, and symbolic representation. Ideal Spaces is also a high-tech project that uses diverse technologies in new ways, also new techniques and programming developed by us.
Our team, the Ideal Spaces Working Group, has been engaged for many years in that theme of spaces being 'ideal' according to how space is practiced, planned, imagined and experienced. Now, we want to present some results of our ongoing investigations.
The exhibition deals with ideal spaces in a double sense: as spaces imagined and as spaces utopian, or perfected. In both its meanings of being ‘ideal’, an ideal space relates to utopian space, an old theme deeply embedded in our cultural memory which has never lost its actuality and appeal. With a look at recent conditions, we need to re-address it more than ever.
Since it is a mythic theme full of hopes and dreams, and at the same time, very practical. Today, the majority of human beings live in urban agglomerations which are far away from being 'ideal' but chaotic, accompanied by an actual destruction of space unprecedented in history. In parallel, never before so many technical possibilities of imagining spaces existed, allowing for escape into worlds of fantasy, dream, and game. Space is lost, and at the same time multiplied. But human beings need space, also real one deserving the name, and they need community.
Issues which have to be settled, urgently. One first step in doing so may consist in re-framing them, to look at them anew, from different but nevertheless related perspectives. We did so by taking the theme's archaic character as a background tale, the myth of a paradise lost and to be regained again, and by actively involving the visitors. Today, the question arises of what an ideal space actually is, or could be.
We want to invite visitors to join this venture, through contemplation and activity. By experiencing historical spaces conceptualized as ideal ones: shown in a large cave, as worlds of their own, and on a cosmic disk presenting them in connection. And by constructing their own spaces, which will allow the visitors to experience their commonly generated spaces together, both as a process and as a result. A paradise is no place of solitude, and it cannot be built by a single person; but is the result of a common effort. All relevant data are kept and will be available for those interested; so the venture can continue, even after the exhibition itself has closed its gates.
If the myth of paradise is an eternal tale about life worth to be lived, who says that such a myth is a lie? Referring to the Biennale’s theme for 2016, as a universal tale, it can open up many universes. Oscar Wilde has said that a map without utopias is not worth to be drawn. Many myths came into reality, and shaped reality.
Let's try.