Early utopias were spatial utopias: Somewhere, on a distant island or an unreachable star, life would be much better, happier and longer. With the Enlightenment, the spatial utopia was transformed into a temporal utopia: if we continue to develop intellectually and technologically, we will soon have created a better, happier and perhaps even immortal world. With the genocide perpetrated by the National Socialists in the twentieth century, the utopian power of thought initially disappeared. But for the twenty-first century, Bruno Latour noted that ‘our idea of the future […] has switched from a temporal to a spatial variant’: ‘In all notions of progress, the future existed without a locus. Today, every projection into time is reeled in by the simple fact that the space has to be defined in which we will have a future’.
The most spectacular spatial utopias aim to create new living space outside the Earth, in space stations or on planets such as Mars or Venus. But this dream of a new life is very expensive and will be reserved to few people in the foreseeable future. The final hiking station of the Triennial is therefore devoted to alternative visions of future habitats on earth. Concepts like cohabitation and equality, empathy and care, emphasise the struggle taking place for new collective narratives which could describe a possible transformation. The ‘economic utopias’ of the industrial age are to give way to a ‘utopia of ecology’, where nature is no longer solely a resource. The exhibition thus presents and discusses approaches proposing a new understanding of nature, not in the sense of naturalising humans or anthropomorphising nature – but in the spirit of a communion of survival between equals.