Call Utopia / Utopia Calling
1.
– Simo, press the buzzer!
– I’d rather stay still.
2.
A scene of failure. A minimal gesture. Transmitter and receiver remain apart, unable to meet. Communication does not take place; the message never arrives. Utopia inhabits this gap, between intention and its fulfillment.
Participation in the exhibition
Tatlin’s Dream – Art Exhibition & Public Program | 26.09 – 01.11.2025
Art Exhibition: 2 October – 1 November 2025
First Floor, Athens Conservatoire
Opening: 2 October 2025, 19:00–21:30
Public Program: 26 September – 25 October 2025
Aris Garoufalis Hall, Polychoros Ω2, Aitherion, and the Drama School Hall (ground floor)
Curator: Dimitris Trikas
Organised by: Rizes Politismou (Non-Profit Cultural Organisation)
1.
– Σίμο, πάτησε το κουδούνι!
– Προτιμώ να μείνω ακίνητος.
2.
Η σκηνή μιας αποτυχίας. Μια ελάχιστη χειρονομία. Πομπός και δέκτης παραμένουν σε απόσταση, ανίκανοι να συναντηθούν. Η επικοινωνία δεν πραγματοποιείται, το μήνυμα δεν φτάνει. Η ουτοπία κατοικεί σε αυτό το κενό, ανάμεσα στην πρόθεση και την εκπλήρωσή της.Call Utopia / Utopia Calling
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Συμμετοχή στην έκθεση
Το Όνειρο του Τάτλιν – Εικαστική ‘Εκθεση & Δημόσιο Πρόγραμμα | 26.09 – 01.11.2025
- Εικαστική έκθεση: 2 Οκτωβρίου έως 1 Νοεμβρίου 2025: Α’ όροφος Ωδείου Αθηνών
Εγκαίνια: 2 Οκτωβρίου 2025, 19:00-21.30 - Δημόσιο πρόγραμμα: 26 Σεπτεμβρίου έως 25 Οκτωβρίου: Αίθουσα Άρης Γαρουφαλής, Πολυχώρος Ω2, Aitherion, Αίθουσα Δραματικής Σχολής (ισόγειο).
Επιμέλεια: Δημήτρης Τρίκας
Διοργάνωση: ΑΜΚΕ ΡΙΖΕΣ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΣΜΟΥ
A note on
Call Utopia / Utopia Calling
by accelerator_mod.21
The small installation titled Call Utopia / Utopia Calling stages an encounter between obsolete communication devices and found photographic relics, proposing a modest drama of failed transmission. The intercom units, removed from their architectural context yet still carrying the residue of everyday address, delineate a threshold that never quite becomes operative. Their presence invokes the promise of a call, of a voice attempting to cross a boundary that remains stubbornly inert.
The addition of vernacular portrait photographs gestures toward a temporal layering, as if personal memory could be grafted onto the mechanics of urban communication. Yet the graft does not fully take. Rather than forming a new composite body, image and device remain parallel entities, momentarily touching without establishing a genuine continuity. This partial adhesion, though not without conceptual interest, exposes the fragility of the proposition: the aesthetic relation remains tentative, almost provisional, as if the work itself hesitates to commit.
What emerges is a scene suspended between intention and realization. The failure of communication—central to the work’s stated premise—appears less as an enacted condition and more as an annotation about the condition. The installation hints at a poetics of interruption but stops short of embodying it materially. One senses the outline of a more rigorous articulation that has not yet fully arrived.
Still, within this incompleteness lies a certain clarity. Utopia operates precisely in the gap between desire and its fulfillment, inhabiting the blank space where the call is made but no answer returns. In that sense, the work inadvertently reveals its most compelling aspect: the unadorned interval in which the impulse to connect exposes its own impossibility. It is a minor gesture, perhaps, but one that locates utopia exactly where it tends to reside—in the unresolved distance between sender and receiver.
yiannis isidorou 