Art – and culture in general – is a practical resource for raising awareness among young people. In the past, we have talked about Music and Utopias; in this article, we talk instead about Art and Utopia, presenting a remarkable example of how we can speak of Model City-Society through works of art: the NATURA/UTOPIA exhibition, art between ecology, reuse and the future by the Perugia Foundation.
Art realises impossible dreams and teaches us to believe in the future, connecting humans’ talent and creativity with the hope of change.
Today, young people – and not only them – are accustomed to a narrow, short-sighted vision, often oriented towards satisfying momentary desires and basic, immediate needs. Reflection and confrontation around the great themes, great ambitions, dreams, and utopias that enabled human progress in the past, have lost their power and attractiveness. Instead, today, we have many topics that could be of great support to warm the souls of young people and stimulate their imagination.
“The only possible answer to the anxieties of our age is the work of art, not as a solution or compensation, but as an imaginative autonomous practice, separate but not indifferent from reality, just like the island of Utopia, a utopian paradise detached from the rest of the world but at the same time a projection of what it could be”. This is how curator Marco Tonelli presents the heart of the fascinating exhibition of the Perugia Foundation ‘NATURE/UTOPIA – Art between ecology, reuse and the future’ (Palazzo Baldeschi, 23 April – 3 November 2024).
Thirteen outstanding artists from all over the world were chosen. Their unique perspectives can make us reflect on issues related to ecology, the relationship between man and nature, sustainability, the reuse of materials and the redesigning of human living space on the natural environment. They interpret a deep desire to believe that “a happy island, where everything is sustainable because it increases the richness of the world, both in form and thought”, is not just a mirage but a possible world.
The works are made from traditional, but also unexpected and innovative materials.
Among the artists present, inspired by the theme of Utopia, there are:
- Ugo la Pietra, who has always used architecture to reflect on the contradictions and relationships between nature and the city;
- Nicola Toffolini, who creates landscapes of utopian worlds where everything seems to take us back to a futuristic condition;
- Gonçalo Mabunda, an artist from Mozambique, whose masks made from bullets, grenades, rifles, shells as reused materials on the one hand evoke fetishes, totems and ritual headgear, and on the other seem to be caricatures of anthropomorphic and mechanised faces that recall the bloody civil war that devastated his country;
- Pascale Marthine Tayou, who creates environmental installations using coloured plastic bags, not recycled but new, as if their consumption and degradation had been avoided and frozen into a work of art;
- Kaarina Kaikkonen, a prominent and recognised contemporary Finnish artist, works exclusively with reused and salvaged clothes, mostly men’s shirts.
Reuse, utopia, project, nature, and future are the words around which the research of all these artists revolves, in different historical moments and places in the world, but united by an ecological and eco-aesthetic reading of the world.
The President of Perugia Foundation, Cristina Colaiacovo, sums up the value of art in raising public awareness: “When confronted with the infinite avenues of creativity, visitors explore new perspectives, visions, and solutions, and this is particularly true about the theme of the environment and the future of humanity.
Utopia means ‘non-place’ while eutopia means ‘good place.’ Art creates good places, and only in this way can we progress, building good places and beauty to live and play. This event and initiatives of this nature are an excellent opportunity for young people because, through art, they can help the new generations to conceive possible alternative solutions, confronting them with the complexity of current environmental and social phenomena and giving space to their need for change, also through their creativity.