Blog post: Katarzyna Perlak

I dedicated the fellowship period to researching the notion of a ‘wish landscape’. I was particularly interested in the image of the horizon and its proximity to affects of hope and longing. In my research I enquired into the historical development of what are utopias. I wanted to investigate the shift from an ontologically static series of utopian visions, based on geographical locations or society orders, to more recent phenomenologically influenced positions emphasising fluidity and affectual modes of seeing or feeling.

One of the historical thinkers I was reading was Ernst Bloch, a German Marxist philosopher who created an important bridge between a modern era utopianism and contemporary notions of utopia. In his Principle of Hope and The Spirit of Utopia whilst constructing his own blueprint, he discusses all forms of utopia including, but not limited to, social, literary, technological, medical and geographical. For Bloch utopia is far from a literary genre or topographical location. Instead it is a much more complex principle, an expression of ‘anticipatory consciousness’ or a utopian impulse. Not a place but what takes place, not elsewhere, but right here and now.

This impulse has its source in dissatisfaction with the current state of things - pointing at ‘something that is missing’. Bloch’s utopianism revolves around the concept of not-yet-here and no-longer-conscious. The not-yet is the driving force of utopian impulse, an aspiration, a principle that transforms ‘wishful thinking’ to ‘wilful thinking’, which generates a critical imagination of the future.

Bloch’s notion of ‘not-yet-there’ has been foundational for many contemporary utopian discourses. It is defined as a mode of being and feeling that is not present but an opening, an act of imagining transformation. Bloch initiates the shift from the notion of ‘utopian program’ to ‘utopian wish’ while putting a particular emphasis on analysing utopia in the context of the arts (including painting, opera and music) he introduces the notion of ‘wish landscape’. A concept which I found particularly useful when contextualising the utopian potentiality of the horizon.

In addition to this theoretical research I was also gathering moving image materials. Capturing multiple images of horizons in the Venetian landscape, pictorial representations in artworks, and people capturing the horizon. This material is part of an ongoing collection that will be incorporated into a new moving image work.

5 seconds horizon notes - Venice. from Katarzyna Perlak on Vimeo.