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Stefanos Tsivopoulos, I WANT MY UTOPIA BACK / 26.03.2011 >

Stefanos Tsivopoulos, I WANT MY UTOPIA BACK

appropriated archival image for archiviazioni.org

03.26.2011

curated by Giusy Checola

Stefanos Tsivopoulos, I WANT MY UTOPIA BACK, 2011, appropriated archival image, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.

I think that we are at a crossing in the roads of history, history in the grand sense. One road already appears clearly laid out, at least in its general orientation.

That's the road of the loss of meaning, of the repetition of empty forms, of conformism, apathy, irresponsibility, and cynicism at the same time as it is that of the tightening grip of the capitalist imaginary of unlimited expansion of "rational mastery," pseudo-rational, pseudo-mastery, of an unlimited expansion of consumption for the sake of consumption, that is to say, for nothing, and of a techno-science that has become autonomized along its path and that is evidently involved in the domination of this capitalist imaginary.

The other road should be opened: it is not at all laid out. It can be opened only through a social and political awakening, a resurgence of the project of individual and collective autonomy, that is to say, of the will to freedom. This would require an awakening of the imagination and of the creative imaginary.

Cornelious Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, Stanford University Press, July 18, 2007

On the occasion of its public presentation, Archiviazioni has invited Stefanos Tsivopoulos to elaborate an archive image which represents the main concept and the aims of the project. I Want My Utopia Back is a reflection on the concept of Autonomy in relation to that of Archiving as an action. This transformative process that goes from information to knowledge, from institutional construction to social action and the formation of an autonomous consciousness, was also the basis of democracy in ancient Greece. For Tsivopoulos, archives do not necessarily server as ‘representatives’ of the historical truth, but rather as another way to tell a story. This story aims to reflect the creative and imaginary possibilities of our times.

Stefanos Tsivopoulos (Prague, 1973) is a Greek artist/filmmaker who lives and works in Athens and Amsterdam. His research reflects on history and historical memory as a narrative construction – a construction mediated by images that have been edited and re-edited, and deprived from images that were never taken or that are lost. In his films he is blurring fact and fiction, past and future, as he is less interested in extracting the truth from these narrative constructions, but rather in interrogating the possibilities and qualities that lie within them. It is the ambiguous nature of image, and its shift from an aesthetic object, to commodity to archived evidence of historical truth that is on question in his work.