Utopias Bach: Revolutions in Miniature by Wanda Zyborska
Figure 1 Wanda Zyborska (2008) Wanda and Trish go South: An Australian Utopia Bach
An artistic response to an overwhelming situation
• Corona Virus fears, restrictions and isolation
• Mass extinctions
• Existential threat
• Increasing inequalities
• Crisis of truth
• Loss of faith in government
• Economic disasters (disastrous economies, disastrous behaviour by companies and their lobbyists)
Utopias/no places...whatever I might think about them, I am often planning them, or daydreaming about them, one way or another. I thought it might be useful to have some ideas at the ready, to start discussions, to avoid beginning in a void. So I dug into my swirl of un-realised ideas, kept somewhere at the lower back of my head, sometimes leaking into my body, and rising to the surface when stimulated by Samina and Lindsey's mini-utopia idea back in summer 2020, now materialising as Utopias Bach.
Two cherished mini ideas were first to come to the surface; one was to make mini-(no)places to go under the domes I have been collecting over the years. The other was a mini-(utopian)-landscape, peopled by mini-people, this should manifest within a bigger landscape. This idea is one of my oldest, arising from childhood imaginings in the vast spaces of Australia, where I devised tiny peopled landscapes within landscapes projected imaginatively on the landscape around me in chosen places, like the gullies alongside the road, as a coping mechanism to avoid being overwhelmed by the enormous scale of that country. I know from experience the pleasurable escapist benefits of this kind of mini-utopic imaginings, manifest in dolls houses and miniature towns and villages. They can be nostalgic and sad, as in The Bottle city of Kandor in Superman, miniaturised and saved when the planet Krypton was destroyed by the supervillain Brainiac. An example of the dark side of miniaturising utopias. I must keep something of the dystopian in my mini-utopias, they must never reach the horror of the realised utopia, utopia must be something strived for but not quite arrived at or fixed, if it wants to avoid the dangers spelled out in literature and fact in utopian exploits of the past. I want to keep the striving for utopia in process, on a moving polarity of deterritorialisation.
Age as a target group
Some Utopias Bach are rather literal and object based, others could be more conceptual, or more socially conceived. Potential partners include wildlife trusts, community development workers and experts in visual impairment or hearing loss, demographically more likely to be experiencing exacerbated isolation in the group for In Touch (second idea below).
The first one that I have started, coming out of an original idea, is a simple one, where I kept wanting to plant trees in front gardens that didn't have any, especially in the long high street of Gaerwen, and also in the estate in Menai Bridge where I live. In Menai Bridge I wanted to extend this to include wildflower meadows and orchards in the green council owned areas of the estate, and verges, which has expanded into every green action that comes up, from bee hotels and bird baths, wildlife gardens, ponds etc. The idea comes from an aesthetic impulse, but is substantially about sustaining wildlife.
Idea: Pentre Bach Gwyrdd: Little Green Village
Wanda Zyborska (2020) Utopia Bach. Gatepost, plants and mosses, monopoly houses.
Working in the suburban area of Menai Bridge to make gardens and public areas greener through forming a group and mapping positive interventions such as planting trees and plants for birds and insects, hedgehog routes, fruit trees and wildflower meadows on Council greens, bee hotels and bird boxes. Could be extended to include plastic free shops or other local business initiatives as well. As well as an online map it could be manifest in homemade maps, miniature gardens, amongst other things.
Idea: In Touch
Making haptic art connections for old women living on their own and self-isolating, using performance, snail mail or digital platforms. The idea is that the project team is made up of the same demographic so that there is no division between artist and community.
This utopia is miniature in that it includes only a small section of society; socially isolated old women living alone and suffering particularly during the pandemic. This artwork is defined by its audience, if that is the right term for them, a target group (who are not in a group). The work here would be finding a way to bring tactile art to the group to form an entertainment and a feeling connection with others. This mini-utopia is a network, a map of specific places of isolation, joined together by whatever network of physical and social experience that we could devise in partnership with professional practitioners who work in this area.
Aleah Chapin (2014) IT WAS THE SOUND OF THEIR FEET. Oil on linen, 84 x 120 inches.
Utopias Bach – what next?
The project seems to have two directions, one expressing a need to make actual changes in our communities and ways of living, greening and tree planting for example, embracing diversity. The other is making miniature imaginary worlds, expressing a need for imaginative escapism and perhaps the stimulation of the imagination developed by isolation and reflection.
“Animals, vegetables and minerals take part in the world of art. The artist feels attracted by their physical, chemical and biological possibilities, and …begins again to feel the need to make things of the world, not only as animated beings, but as a producer of magic and marvelous deeds… Among living things he discovers also himself, his body, his memory, his gestures - all that which directly lives and thus begins again to carry out the sense of life and of nature…the sensory, sensational, sensitive, impressionable and sensuous”.
- Germano Celant (1969) Art Povera in Harrison & Wood (1996) Art in Theory 1900-1990 Cambridge: Blackwell (p 886)
Utopias Bach Project as a Whole
Utopias Bach will seek questions rather than answers, or at least we will avoid rigid conclusions. I use the polarities of Deleuze and Guattari as a theoretical tool in understanding the particular creative flow between the virtual and actual in my practice. This is part of a theoretical toolbox I use to analyse, and a conceptual framework to extend my experimental practice (see annex below). Relevant concepts to this project might include Deleuze and Guattari's assemblages, deterritorialisation and becoming; Deleuze's Baroque fold (after Gottfried Leibniz) and Judith Butler’s performativity.
We move between polarities of experience and expression, openness an intention. The movement is rhizomatic, we are using the term rhizome in the way that deleuze and guattari are using it in speaking about kafka’s story the burrow, where
“his work lacks the usual linear narrative structure and can be ‘entered’ into at any point, to map out connections with other points” Young et al, 2013, p262
We are experimenting with new methods and responding to the challenges of defining and imagining new ways of working together as artists and activists under a period of pandemic/climatic challenge. In doing so we produce a collection of tools and strategies for thought and action. These tools will help us understand the creative process between the virtual and actual in practice.
What I have found:
Without looking for ways to work under Covid, I have been working differently and it has been affecting what I have done – that is, the subject or topic of the work includes (or comes out of) Covid, apparently subconsciously. What I have noticed:
Working slowly
Reflection and fragility
Becoming with nature – interdependency, relationship, symbiosis, material world
Containment
Dependence on technology
I have also consciously been looking at how to work under Covid. This has been driven by working with others, trying to get grants and to fulfil their requirements. Issues arising:
Working online – Zoom, social media and platforms, information networks
Working small – actually small, and keeping ambitions small
Concentrating on inclusivity rather than quality
Working with people as they manifest - if they want to!
Wanda Zyborska is a partner in Utopias Bach