The exhibition used Utopia merely as a catalyst to fuel other ideas. Consequently, it left any comprehensive definition of Utopia to others. Our aim was simply to pool our efforts, motivated by a need to change the landscape inside and outside, a need to integrate the work of many artists so that we might be integrated into a larger kind of community, a bigger conversation, another state of being. Each present and future contributor was asked to create a poster for use in the next Station and beyond; wherever it can hang, it can go. In this way Utopia Station evolves images, even if it does not start with one. Each person who created a poster was also asked to make a statement of between one and two hundred words. The statements mounted up. Stuart Hall and Zeigam Azizov elaborated on a proposition: the world has to be made to mean. ‘The bittersweet baked into hope,’ wrote Nancy Spero. Raqs Media Collective called Utopia a hearing aid. ‘This probably will not work,’ goes the Cherokee saying cited by Jimmie Durham, who added that the ‘probably’ is what keeps people alive. There were hundreds of statements like these in the end. They were all available to read anywhere via the website e-flux, an artist-run initiative founded by the artist Anton Vidokle, which has become a central information clearinghouse for the art world. Inevitably, certain figures began to be repeated: ships and songs and flags, potatoes, Sisyphus, figures familiar from the history of discussions of Utopia. Utopia Station became an archive of experimentation.

From Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

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