Trust and faith in positive development is a prerequisite for the sustainability of humanity, civilisation and human existence. For the community and the individual, the promise of a better society, of a better quality of life, of a happier future, is the ammunition that makes the present hardships bearable, meaningful and survivable.
Such imagined, idealized worlds have been called utopias, or nowhere-places, since Thomas More. And while a belief in a happy future is essential to the functioning of society, there are equally strong desires for the immutability of the status quo.
The security of the familiar present is reassuring, the unknown of change is ominous. Negative visions of the future – dystopias – have been an integral part of the psychological functioning of society since the beginning of history, but they became nominalised and ‘popular’ in the age of industrialization and modernization, and have now become a familiar truism of our uncertain everyday existence.
Anna Fabricius’ exhibition 12 Gestures asks questions about faith in the future through her large-scale landscapes and portraits. Her utopian/dystopian landscapes are the ruins of positive living spaces of the past destined for the future. Built in the 1970s, the futuristic complex offered mobility, communal togetherness and high living to an elite audience in Taiwan, whose brief heyday was interrupted by the oil crisis.
Abandoned living spaces pasted on the walls provide a negative force field for Fabricius’ black and white portraits, gestures of positive living situations in the present destined for the future. Who sees themselves 10 years from now? The gestures incorporate the function of hope and orientation, sketching the most idealistic and favourable scenario possible in a gesture.
But can a gesture be utopian? Gestures of “anything is possible” are stiffened into immobility by the accelerating changes and crises of our world.