The Utopian Library

A social sculpture, the Utopian Library comprises a ceramic shelf created by artist Charlotte Dualé and suggestions for a library of various utopias by artistic collaborators and friends of Kemmler Foundation.
Following the library theme, the accompanying exhibition features artistic contributions exploring the realms of writing, reading and language, including a sound installation of GAS, an experimental collective novel written over ten months by ten different authors and serialized on Cashmere Radio. A Borscht and Varenyky dinner was served by Monday Kitchen, a collective of young Ukrainian artists, creatives and activists.

The idea was simple. We would send out emails, iMessages, and WhatsApp chats. We would write to friends of Kemmler Foundation and the artists we had worked with in the past. We would ask them a straightforward question: What is the one book you would choose if you had to recommend a title for our project? Our project was called, a little grandiosely, the Utopian Library. Of course, the question isn’t actually that simple. To start with, what even is a utopian library? 

The idea to collect a library of utopias was born last fall after a visit to artist Charlotte Dualé’s studio, which is located outside of Neukölln in a Kleingartensiedlung. In part, the Utopian Library is the ceramic shelf Dualé created. Titled Hey Moon (2023), the shelf is a functional artwork, but like many of Dualé’s works, this basic functionality is as much a gesture as it is a starting point to question, subvert and transform the order that shapes our everyday lives. The shelf’s pictorial elements protrude from the orderly (and ordering) structure like emanations of a dream, a collective unconscious. They seem to evoke hopeful promise – stairs ascending into heaven, time suspended on a clock losing its numerals – but perhaps also dread. Out of the clay tiles that, after all, have been burned in an oven, grow limbs that reminded me of the hands and feet of the dying in Picassos Guernica. 

The Utopian Library is also a social sculpture. It will grow with time, as we ask our collaborators, our guests and supporters to make a contribution to its collection. The prompt is deliberately open and most importantly open to interpretation. The suggestions we have gotten from artists, writers, curators, co-workers and friends range from classic works of the utopian tradition to contemporary novels, from political activism and philosophical critique to very personal recommendations: books that found their reader at the right time and place in their lives to unfold their intrinsic utopian promise. 

Whenever we told people about the Utopian Library, the reference that came up most readily was Borges’s Library of Babel. In some way, however, Borges’ dark short story about a library that contains every book that can possibly be written, represents the opposite of what we want to achieve with our own library. The inherent danger of utopia is totality. Nothing is more lifeless than singular visions of ideal places and future societies in which a fixed role is ascribed to everything and everyone. The Utopian Library is a sculpture of incomplete plurality: as it expands, it will contain many voices, but it will always unfinished and open to other voices, possibilities and contributions. 

Hence it seemed fitting, necessary even, to celebrate the library’s inauguration with a plurality of voices and artistic positions. What unites the artists we invited and the works we have assembled tonight is a common interest in the acts of language, writing and reading that shape the experience of our everyday world. Artists like Hanna Stiegler, Lexia Hachtmann and Henri Haake explore the beauty and dream-like qualities of the mundane but also the power of language to – sometimes violently – ascribe meaning to what we see. The violence inherent in the deconstruction of language and the written word is as powerful an interest in the work of French artist Thomas (1941-2000) as is the exploration of its liberatory potential in freeing us from our socially constructed and constrained individuality. Overcoming the invention and loneliness of the artist as a singular, individual creator, is a utopian dream as old as that invention itself. GAS, an experimental novel in ten chapters written by ten different authors, can be read as an effort within this Utopian tradition – an effort not to deconstruct, but to construct something new and communal. 

This interest in the meeting of art and literature, language and imagery, perhaps comes quite naturally to a project like Kemmler Foundation that is interested in the art of Utopia. From philosophical treatises to sci-fi novels, utopian fictions paint images of phantasmic realms. Yet these imaginary places are – cover art aside
– not evoked primarily through physical images, but in writing, speaking directly to the image making ma- chine in our minds. Utopia famously can be translated as “no place”, a place that is nowhere to be found. If it can be found at all, however, we may find it somewhere in the border region between language and imagery, where reading, writing, thinking, and seeing become one. 

Patrik Gräb