Isola Pepe Verde-RiMaflow: Cultivating Utopia

Sunday, 17 May 2015, 11:00 – 20:00

Wednesday, 20 May 17: 00 – 20:30, with guided tours open to all.
Community garden Isola Pepe Verde, Via Pepe 10, Milan.

Isola Utopia – a project by Isola Art Center – presents: Cultivating Utopia / Isola Pepe Verde – RiMaflow.
On the occasion of the Festival of Isola Pepe Verde, Isola Art Center in collaboration with NABA presents a project curated by Angelo Castucci, Sara Marchesi and Bert Theis.

With the particiation of: Alessandro Azzoni, Martina Brembati, Laura Burocco, Marina Viola Cavadini, Irene Coppola, Laura Corradi, Ruben De Sousa Pereira, Paola Di Bello, Edna Gee, Noy Jessica Laufer, Giulia Maiorano, Carlo Miele, Giulia Pellegrini, Francesco Pieraccini, Giovanna Repetto, Valentina Rigon, Seriocollective (Edith Poirier, Daniele Rossi), Camilla Topuntoli, Marcella Toscani, Maria Cristina Zappa, Fabiola Zero.

Special Guests: Dario Azzellini (Paris), Matteo Renzi (c/o Piero Gilardi, Turin), Nikolay Oleynikov (Moscow), Oliver Ressler (Vienna) Nikola Uzunovski (Skopje-Bangkok).

One needs to distinguish the utopist from the utopians,

or rather the abstract utopias from the concrete utopias (…)

The utopist thought explores the impossible,

while the utopian thought emanates the possible.

Henri Lefebvre

Isola Utopia presents two concrete utopias: the community garden Isola Pepe Verde and the self-managed factory RiMaflow! This year Isola Art Center is dedicating this double contribution to celebrate the birthday of the community garden Isola Pepe Verde, presenting “fight-specific” works and art projects created for these two contexts by Italian and international artists. The reclaimed factory RiMaflow is battling many difficulties in order to re-launch production with an ecological approach. Isola Pepe Verde is committed to render this green and self-organized social space in Via Pepe permanent. The space is still under threat as the terrain will remain a building area unless the Territorial Administration Plan is changed by the City Council.

These two concrete utopias, already compared in an event at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan last December, share the conviction that utopia is not just a place of otherness, different from the now, but a process of re-inventing the present by questioning the pre-existing conditions, in order to build a real alternative. As Lewis Mumford wrote, “Two different kinds of utopias exist: utopias of escape and the utopias of reconstruction. The first leaves the external world the way it is; the second seeks to change it so that one may have intercourse with it on one’s own terms”.

Cultivating Utopia does not mean to merely affirm the fact that it is not found in an abstract future, nor is it to simply insist on the necessity to start a research and formulate a new theory of the possible. Instead it means to highlight how the seeds of utopia have already been cast, and how our task is to take care of the fruits that are already growing so that it can grow, spread and strengthen its roots. This is what unites the project of Isola Art Center, a different idea of the city, public space, and culture, and the fight of RiMaflow for a sustainable and horizontal production.

Man has always walked with his feet firmly on the ground, but his head has always been in the clouds: the utopian present draws his strength from the imagination, an imagination so real that it will make us believe that we can even take flight.