Utopias – inevitable?

Dialogue lecture with Hannah Sieben and Dieter Daniels around the audio work Calling Utopia

On permanence of utopia in art, the conflict of contemporaneity vs. utopia and the rediscovery of collectivity – with examples from Theodor Adorno to Angela Merkel as well as several remote places called „Utopia“.

Hannah Sieben produced the audio work Calling Utopia as graduation piece at HGB Leipzig together with the theoretical part „im Grunde utopisch" Kunst als Agent der utopischen Dynamik ("basically utopian" – art as the agent of utopian dynamics). Calling Utopia consists of recordings of telephone calls with citizens of Utopia, a real texan town. The mundane description of the town is always confronted with the meaning of its name.