Trials to Formulate a Utopia
Merlina Rañi
A patient stroke observes, investigates and tries different utopias, all the ones needed to understand this conceptual technology, impossible to fathom for the current realms of the imagination. The composition of these utopias comes from earlier time periods and cultures, yet it is deeply connected to modern age, that archetype of fatal destiny in which the desire to create utopias always seems to disappear.
If we analyze how the stroke begins, there seems to be a bit of all-embracing ingenuity that makes it incompatible with the complex ideas it tries to represent. There is always something left out from the cultural biases that define concepts such as harmony, love or justice.
However, in these series of works dedicated to utopias, strokes have the intention to highlight forms and forces positively expressed. The context is a practice that Roma Blanco has been following under the title Alchemical Exercises. The result of this practice is a series of conceptual mappings charted with subjective connections. Their goal is to harmonize opposites, integrate languages and disciplines in order to analyze different ways of getting to know something. It is about putting knowledge together and formulating ideas by bringing different symbols to the same map so that they coexist in the same time and space.
The body of work includes codes with humanistic spirit, inherent to modern philosophy and ideas. What is more, the practices used to produce these codes place the Alchemical Exercises in the contemporary world: a terrain of multiple topics and languages is used, the system of relations overpowers symbols, there is a need to shift and contextualize practice, just to mention a few characteristics of modern times that we can see reflected on Roma's search.
These are conceptual works of art with a very important formal connotation, in which the operations inherent to the artistic process come from a grandiose intellectual activity, which is, above all, personal and intimate. At the same time, there is a need for a physical, tangible activity, that is nothing but visceral. It is a magical imprint in which elements from different dimensions come together.
The Trials to Formulate a Utopia are developed simultaneously in two different scenarios: City of Washington and Literary Utopias. In the case of the Washington investigation, there is a primary intention to overlap conceptual maps with the physical territory, the realm of what is strictly idealistic with the physical realm. The city of Washington appears to be the perfect scenario for such an ordeal: it was a planned city, built as the capital of a new country in a “new world”, the symbol of an overall trend of independence and sovereignty that laid the foundations of a new era.
When Roma walks around the city and examines it through the lens of her own practice, she collects information of a given, strong symbolic field that represents an operating and pragmatic urban plan, but she also gathers the codes for an idea of a nation and a powerful plea that traversed the bodies, lives, minds and souls of those that became its inhabitants. It is the projection of an utopia in which politics and mysticism are combined in a sophisticated manner; a prolific, discreet connection between wisdoms for Roma's research.
The work about Literary Utopias addresses the imaginary characteristics proposed by different utopias; the similarities and peculiarities in narrations from different times and cultures. In there, there are no restrictions, but there are symbols, schemes and entries that Roma uses to try and understand these ideas and formulate hypotheses.
The series, centered in the act of formulating something, looks for the inherent meaning of the role as an activity carried out inside a system of elements. It might give us clues to understand the civilization we belong to and interpret our cultural training, the way in which we perceive and get to know something. It serves to unveil a substratum that is hidden, but which structures “universal” knowledge.
The proposed systems also encourage Roma to draw; they constitute a reason to design, a location criterion that ends up forming an idea. In fact, Roma is trying to give the design its meaning, to load mysticism with science, maths with art and gestures with logic in order to avoid any possible dichotomy.