Mapping utopia
Antinomy Perfected: Everyday Life and Utopia in Situationist Politics of Space
by Derya Ozkan (March 2005)
“The New Babylon comprises a set of texts in which Constant tries to develop ideas for a future city; along with models and images conceived as illustrative elaboration of those ideas. Constant’s work certainly involves a projection into the future, yet at the same time it is meant to be played with today. In the concrete production component of his work, Constant makes use of various mediums of representation ranging from architectural drawing, model-making, painting, lithography, photomontage to music and film; going beyond the disciplinary expectations of any specific medium. By way of this transdisciplinary effort, he seeks to surpass conventional notions of representation. In other words, by forcing the limits of representation, Constant tries to see through abstraction and looks for emancipatory ways of giving form to lived experience.”
Reminds me of Diagrams of Utopia by Anthony Vidler (in The Activist Drawing : Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond)
“Operating between form and word, space and language, the diagram is both constitutive and projective, performative rather than representational … proposing a world other than that which exists… The diagram in this context can act to galvanize the discourse only if both political form and architectural form are entered into its equation.”