Curator:
Sabine Folie (born 1962 in Bolzano, Italy; lives and works in Vienna, Austria).

Description:
Group exhibition curated by Sabine Folie at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, Austria, on view from June 19 to September 20, 2009.

Featuring:  Yona Friedman, Giuseppe Gabellone, Cyprien Gaillard, Isa Genzken, Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, Florian Pumhösl, Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij, Robert Smithson, Rob Voerman, Stephen Willats.

“The exhibition sets its sights on modernity’s design for a more humane and contemporary society since the early twentieth century: a design for new forms of living and new cityscapes. What happened to this utopia? The architecture and design concepts by the artists represented in the exhibition contemplate ‘models’ of utopian, pure design in their state of deterioration. Sometimes preserving moments of the crystalline, they are riddled with decay, entropy, ruin, and ‘rust’ (Smithson), yet find nourishment from the idea of the bricolage, the implementation “of that which is there,” from the concept of recycling, so to speak. With that, they formulate final day stages, testing survival on the remnants of a demised civilization. These remnants are the final resources. On the other hand, these approaches thus take up a practically utopian thought of ‘sustainability,’ the idea of a better society, born of the spirit of dystopia.

“When desolation, neglect, and the degeneration to slums as bleak and relentless final evidence of an exploitative, brutalized society of competition, profit, and fanaticism have caused the utopia of a humane, enlightened society to collapse, then humility is called for in order to make something from the void with whatever means remain after the catastrophe. These dystopias are constructed from the hackneyed ideas of a thousand-year-old human history, of the resonance and reflected memory of utopian design and architecture, in view of which an awareness ought to be generated that available resources are limited and a redefinition of the new, of progress is called for.”
—Press release, “Modernism as a Ruin: An Archaeology of the Present,” Generali Foundation website.