UTOPIA

Tin, lead and silver, 220 x 83 x 1 cm, 2016.

Since Thomas More’s “Utopia”, the island has served as more than a geographical form surrounded by water. As a non-place, situated somewhere beyond the known world, it becomes a projection surface for other social orders—a mirror of the present and an image of what might exist otherwise. To think through islands is therefore also to enter an ambiguous territory between the real and the imagined, between existing places and the hopes, desires, and fears projected onto them. In the Mediterranean, this ambiguity has acquired a particular urgency. Islands become at once geographical realities and charged symbols: thresholds between territories, destinations of hope, and sites marked by displacement, exclusion, and catastrophe. Taking the outline of Lampedusa as its form, “Utopia” condenses these tensions into a metallic amalgam of tin, lead, and silver. The sculpture holds together contradictory qualities—preciousness and toxicity, attraction and weight, promise and threat—giving material form to the unstable boundary between utopia and dystopia.