I turn on some drumming music, close my eyes and there I go, on a journey. My mind travels back in time, to London, 500 years ago. The movie, begins, and with the images, I can also feel the sounds, and the intense scents of the city. And the city is dirty, bursting with life, filled with small businesses of butchers and bakeries, people moving around, going inside and outside pubs, There are carriages being pushed by horses. i hear A small kid screaming, a laundry woman washing clothes at the river. Moving towards the Tower of London, I can see now the heads of executed people put on spikes. The smells are intense, of food and blood, dirt and excrement, of flowers too, sold on a corner, by a dirty sweet girl . Can you picture this? Can you picture London in 1516? Now imagine a gentleman, an educated and civilized man, roaming around, daydreaming, with his hands in his pockets. Can you see him with his three point hat over his dark hair, walking back to his home in Camden, dreamingly looking at the sky? He is Thomas More. An important gentleman. Good and bad, as everyone, but a visionary. 500 years ago, Thomas More wrote the book Utopia. Born in 1478 in London, he was the son of a successful lawyer. He studied in Oxford and became a lawyer just like his father. Then for some time, he was the Lord High Chancellor of England. He lived all his life in London and died in London, condemned to death (having before though, tortured one or two catholics, accused of heresy). Despite his tough ending, Thomas More did drink Ambrosia,the elixir of immortality, because his consciousness, his words, remain alive. Utopia is a word that he invented, which entered the global vocabulary. Thomas More, I am sure, is now overlooking us from Heaven, enjoying eternal bliss while discussing his ideas, with his companions, at some sort of literary salon in Olympus. UTOPIA. I have always liked that word, the name of an imaginary island located in the Atlantic Ocean. So to celebrate the book’s anniversary, I organized an exhibition with a a group of artists coming from different parts of the world. The idea was simple: To respond to utopia with paper based art works and to provide answers to the following two simple questions: how do you connect your work with utopia ? what would be an ideal scenario for your art practice in terms of economics? The exhibition happened at Iklectik art lab, in itself an utopia as well, an arts center dedicated to music and contemporary art, that results from the effort of Eduard and his grandfather, an elderly citizen living in Barcelona, who dared to invest in his beloved grandson’s dreams. So, 10 days before the opening of Drawing Utopias, I went to IKLECTIK, which is located in a little hidden village in the center of London (a 10 minute walk to Westminster), consisting of 5 houses surrounded by a garden. I wanted to check the art works being sent from all over the world. Very curious, I began unpacking one work after another, until I came across a squared cardboard box. I opened it, to discover that inside there was an handmade black folder, protecting Antonio Occulto’s collage for the exhibition. Cut into the black folder, Antonio had designed an elegant little envelope. I opened it, and saw a brand new 20 euro note: Antonio’s contribution for the exhibition, sent from Norway. My heart sank with a sudden epiphany: how interesting the way artists look at everything aesthetically, even money. The insight triggered once more, inside myself, the question that has been haunting me for the past months: What is the force that drives us, artists, to make art, regardless of the fact that the economic reward for whatever we do, 99 percent of times, is zero ? And if so, how do we pay our bills ? Everyone has one answer, but I will give you mine:
Utopia, first edition, 1516, by Thomas More
We are driven by our love of aesthetics, our investigation into the possibility of representing the invisible (the not seen/said), and the transcendental, but also the shadows, the questions the world needs to ask. ( “Artists ask questions”, my friend Jill Rock told me, over the course of a heartwarming phone call from Hastings, by the seaside). Artists do art, because they have to. The force is pulling them, from a strange attractor located in the future ( I would say) and their works, as they all affirm, are the vehicle through which they express their personal utopias, their dreams. I’d say artists are a bit like spiritual people, whether they like it or not. Artists similar to monks, monks similar to artists. Artists are used to the no money scenario. Historically, we have always produced art without any type of expectation in terms of economic reward. Who doesn’t know the story of the artist as a romantic and poor individual living in a small apartment in Paris? Fast forward to the 21st century, we are still, one of the poorest and more precarious professional groups. Why is that? I suspect that artists look at money as an utopia. A no place. A no, no! Most of us just are not interested in money. Or if we are, we don’t know anything (plus we are not interested in knowing) about economics. We just quickly accept the reality that we will have to find a second job to pay the bills. Money, for us, is bad, I suspect. No wonder everyone was so poetic when I asked them to write a comment on their dream economics. Karen Piddington’s dream economics, for example, was a place, “where monetary value doesn’t feature; where human beings do not exploit or dominate the natural world; and where they are reconnected to the earth and respect all species regardless”. As for Johanna Bolton, her ideal was: “A place where we measure achievement in terms of progress, knowledge and refinement, not money. “ And Jill Rock (I can picture her, dreamingly looking at the burst of waves, while I hear her slightly grave voice, over the phone): “Concerning my art work I try to keep money out of it.” Just like in the book utopia, artists thrive for a no money society... But Utopia holds some shadows... Jill was in Hastings, and had some free time, so she decided to re-read Utopia. She found the book creepy and sad, rigid and totalitarian. Her comments reminded me how a while ago, when researching films depicting utopia, I discovered that most, approach the topic through the idea of dystopia. Curiously, many artists present in the exhibition address dystopia. Hugo Houayek, from Brazil, poignantly evokes dystopia, by showing a computer drawing and refusing any type of answer to the two questions. What a sharp example of dystopia, a minimalistic cold drawing, stubbornly refusing to relate to others. His art work, points to one of the greatest fears of our present times: the impact of automation and robots, leading us into a meaningless, disconnected humanity. A new question crosses my mind: Is money, what is leading us to dystopia? I mean, is money the reason for all sorts of problems, happening on earth? I thought so in the past, but today, it is not, my personal opinion. Money, stems from Monad, the one, the unit, and money, I feel, it is not bad. Its neutral, its immaterial, its whatever we want. Its an invention. Money is an invention Money is a unit of energy to be transformed into... whatever. We do live in a world that praises and honours money for all the wrong reasons though. Quite paradoxically, I think artists are profoundly integrated in the mainstream system. They are embedded up to their bones, just like anyone else living today, in its core values. We all run after exhibitions, grants and open calls, produce art all the time, and dream of constant productivity. The funny thing, is that even though we are not interested in economic rewards, most of us are caught in the mouse trap of running after the carrot of career and success (in the carrot/stick metaphor of classical capitalism the carrot is profit or success, and stick is failure, or debt).
Ralph Offenhauser, a financier from the XXth century, is a character from an episode of Star Trek, a famous TV series, that began in 1966.
Headpiece from Thomas More’s work depicting Hythlodaeus
Portrait of Sir Thomas More, by Peter Paul Rubens
Matrix (1999) is a science fiction film exploring dystopia. The film depicts a vision of life on Earth, where life is a façade created by a malevolent cyber intelligence.
In 2016 Switzerland voted a referendum about the basic income. A Basic Income, one of the Utopia’s previsions, is now being debated throughout the world as a possible future scenario.
Commander Jean-Luc Picard, one of the main characters of the TV and film series Star Trek
Charles Eisenstein is an utopian of the 21st century who writes about Gift Economy and how civilization can be shaped from the perspective of an evolution of the human sense of self.
Sacred economics is a book by Charles Eisenstein, that explores visionary ideas of money, gift and society in the Age of transition to a post carbon world.
Utopia, engraving by Johann Froben, 1518 edition
As for myself, what is my carrot now, today, 40 days after I first began writing this essay, my personal carrot, is time, aeon. uchronia, no time. uchronia, all the time. time, to do more art. Meaningful art, slow art. And no place is Utopia a vision, a dream, a playful exercise of imagination, a sketch of an ideal place. It is the name of an imaginary island located in the Atlantic Ocean that is organized in such a way, that people are happier and better off than the ones living in reality, ie, More’s reality, England, 1516. The inhabitants of the Island have no private property and people just have to work 6 hours a day. The book has an interesting structure: it assembles a collection of letters exchanged between a character called More, and a group of other people. Those letters introduce us to the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus, who has visited Utopia. It’s Hythlodaeus who describes and praises the island of utopia. But his name, originating from Greek, funnily, means “nonsense”. It seems as if More, a public figure of his time, uses the book, to denounce private property, and advocate a form of communism through the epistles of Raphael Hythlodaeus/Nonsense, one of his alteregos. More gains courage to rant about the “conspiracy of the rich” which he characterizes as greedy,unscrupulous and useless. He even writes about a kind of gentrification happening in London 500 years ago. He explains how tenants are evicted so that “one insatiable glutton and accursed plague of his native land” may consolidate his fields. The problem, it seems, is always the same: attachment to money. “Monarchs”, he argues, “would do well to swear at their inauguration never to have more than 1,000lbs of gold in their coffers”. The fictional “More” (another of More’s alteregos) doesn’t always agree with what goes on the island of Utopia. As an experienced lawyer, he knows how to argue the pros and cons of Utopia, as described by Raphael. He claims that a country with communal property will have no prosperity. The people will have no incentive to work, since they will be fed by the labor of others. Lack of private property will also eliminate all respect for authority, and increase bloodshed and conflict. Hythlodaeus opinion about property, on the other way, is supported by a religious argument: holding property communally, he says, is the way of life Jesus instructed his apostles to follow, since it would lead to the reduction of pride, greed, poverty, irrationality, and exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. A second theme of Utopia is, once more, very up to date: the belief in technological innovation as a means toward progress. Utopians are very enthusiastic about new technologies, and thrive to master the techniques behind it. Technology, for them, is a means to a better life. 500 years afterwards, technology is seen by many, as a scary evolution, somewhat out of control. The fearful “other” of the 21st century, is the robot, which is taking away humans jobs, and producing inequality. On the other hand technology is enabling now one of Utopias visions: the no money society. People increasingly engage in alternative ways of exchange that don’t rely on money : peer to peer economy, gift economy and the collaborative commons, become buzzwords. Some thinkers of the gift economy even venture to speak about a sacred economics, updating hythlodaeus religious arguments in favour of a no money society, to the values of the 21st century. Are we finally entering the no-money/gift economy era, as Hythlodaeus (Nonsense), so excitedly seemed to be announcing, as the holy grail of socio - economic organization, 500 years ago ? is Utopia’s vision coming true? that crazy/scary/wonderful dream? Drawing Utopias is a subchapter of a project, which began one year ago, after a fantastic dream. I was living in a run down large house, almost in ruins, with my family. The house had a patio and I was very tired as well as my family. In a particular moment of the dream, I was with my face on my hands, resting, talking tired words with my ex partner. Then my friend Marta Wengorovius, suddenly appeared, and walked down the stairs. She was happy and excited. She had come to help me organize my house. She had discovered marvellous furniture in its attic that I had no idea about, and helped me to decorate a business I didn’t know I had: a restaurant, that existed on the first floor of the house. My restaurant was filled with clients, various families, who were all eating delicious colourful food. I woke up in wonder.
Exotic Victorian City, collage and drawing over paper, Dreamscapes artist book, 2017, Maria Lusitano
Striken by this dream, I began the project dream economics in 2016. My goal was to investigate the interconnection between art, dreams and novel economic models, broadly entitled “New Economics”. I was particularly interested in the field of gift economy, after attending a series of talks about it at Saint Ethelburga’s Center for peace and reconciliation in London. New economics originates from a profound disbelief on the current rationalistic approach to economics, that is seen, by larger and larger groups of people, as not serving anyone, anymore. The organizer of the event, Amrita Bhohi defined new economics in the following way: “New economics is not about a single alternative, but about many possible alternatives united by a common set of values. These values, models and practices - democratisation of wealth and ownership, localism, protecting the commons, community sustainability and resilience.” But People keep asking me: Why dreams and economics? And I answer that economics means, in its etymological origin: “house keeping”. But to do a proper house keeping, we need to clean all corners and closed rooms. And dreams can help us do that. But how to explore and bridge night dreams ... with daily dreams/desires and utopias ? NIGHT DREAMS tap into the unconscious. With their help we can truly engage in a profound “inner house keeping” which will help us on our outer world journey. What can dreams tell us about what is there for us to tackle, what is there that is blocking us? Carl Jung, a long time literary friend, studied the function of dreams, and he wrote how “dreams express new thoughts that haven’t reached the threshold of consciousness”. I want to map and decipher dreams, to then sketch new ways to organize my life, our lives. What is happening now? in 2017 ? One year after that dream, I keep dreaming a lot about houses. Huge houses, filled with people, and curiously, always my own. The people in my houses, are not always connected, are not always talking to each other and listening to each other. The houses are a bit chaotic, queer, unusual and strange. But somewhat pleasant. I go around and around in my dream houses sometimes feeling tired and confused. I have been dreaming of houses, because I have been doing some dream housekeeping – dream economics. (Tonight, I plan to incubate a dream: I am going to speak to the strangers that are populating my houses. They are myself,parts of myself. I am going to connect, by having the uncomfortable conversations, that need to be owned. I am going to do some proper dream housekeeping, dream economics. ) The strangers in my dreams are ... “I” and I... am an interbeing No (wo)man is an island. No housekeeping is a solo work. For a proper house keeping (economics) we do need to deeply transform what we are. If we want a new world, shaped by a new, environment-friendly type of economics, that integrates people, animals, plants and minerals, we need to experiment with the idea that there is a stronger force than the one of our ego, our separate self. That force, the eco force, is deeply aware how it relates to everything else. The force knows that the wellness of all is the common good. This idea is beautiful, on a literary and idealistic viewpoint. But to put it into practice, is messy and tough. How can us, artists, so embedded in the tradition of the separate author, the romantic soul, living all her or his life under the spell of the dark night of the soul, (which provides us with our uniqueness) abandon that (perhaps) outdated skin, and move into the skin of the “commonsin-action”, embracing full heartedly the messy collaboration of the relational self, the interbeing ? We cannot fool ourselves. In order to do so, we will have to look at our shadows. Our nightmares. Our darkness. Our dreams. The people with whom we relate on our daily basis, can help us profoundly with that. They are our mirrors. “Relationship, surely, is the mirror in which you discover yourself. Without relationship you are not; to be is to be related;” says Krishnamurti.
Star Trek Spaceship
The astrotravellers inner space journeys, Dreamscapes Artist Book, 2017, Maria Lusitano
Living as if there was no time... in uchronia As a child, I felt I had all the time in the world. I used to lay in bed, daydreaming, anxiously waiting for a space ship, that would take me time travelling through space. The future, I thought, was not on Earth, but on a distant planet that was watching us, observing our evolution. No wonder my enthusiasm, when I discovered the magic philosopher Terence McKenna, speculating about time, with his time machine. What drives history, or linear time, he said, is a ‘Strange Attractor,’ a transcendental object at the end of time. What happens now, is in permanent flow towards a future that wants to happen. My childhood longing for a space ship was my own symbolical strange attractor, pushing me, step by step, towards my becoming. Back then, my favorite series, was Star Trek. I remember how I waited anxiously for Star Trek’s weekly episode, to travel to distant lands. I loved their adventures through space, but also their civility, when relating to each other, and their fascinating encounters with societies different from their own. In Star Trek´s ideal world, in its utopian territory, the federation, everything had worked out. I’ll never forget the famous episode in which commander Jean-Luc Picard tries to explain the federation to character Ralph Offenhouse: “A lot has changed in three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of ‘things’. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions.” Ralph Offenhouse, was a Human financier that in the late 20th century had been diagnosed with terminal cardiomyopathy. He had himself cryogenically frozen, only to wake up 400 years later in a moneyless world, where his bank accounts didn’t exist anymore. Still stuck in the logic of capitalism Offenhouse expressed chock with the economic world of the 24th century. During the 90s, he had successfully pursued profit and self-interest, in tune with the values of his time, in order to have power. The power of money though, in the 24th century, is meaningless. People live in abundance, thus they are now only interested in spiritual development and improving themselves. Star Trek sets up an unusually optimistic scenario for a sci fi film. But the curious clip with Ralph Offenhouse, is ambiguous. “Money has to do with power”, he says... Due to his money, he was able to wake up 3 centuries after his death. As for myself, living in the 21st century, what do I think about power? Power is a neutral force. It can be used in whatever way. Power is potere, skill. And if money unlinks itself from power, what is left? No power, can also be a quite dystopian scenario. What kind of world would we have if all would be sorted out, all in total contentment ? Johan Furåker plays with this idea in his mathematical drawing of a static idyl … “If ideal life is illustrated with mathematical graphics it will be a static line on the top of the paper. For all eternity.” A boring paradisiac idyll where there is nothing to do, is proper for angels, perhaps, but not for us, who have fallen from sky, and embodied matter, blood and flesh, to fool around, make scenes, have sex, construct houses and stories, be overwhelmed by tears and moved by laughter. I am reminding myself now, of an Indian tale, that at a certain point, says: “the well of suffering was getting dry, so it had to be filled again.” Discontent and thirst for new adventures means some degree of challenges, stuff to make us move on... to where? “Is it worth then, to thrive for utopia, for a better world? What is a perfect society, and what’s the best kind of utopianism?” asks Terry Eagleton, then concluding that our system is run by dreamers who call themselves realists. How can us, artists help creating dreams? I ask. Andreia Oliveira reminds us of artists political responsibility with her work. Answering the questions, Andrea refers to a practical possibility that would enable a dream economics: “The concept of an “universal income” which increasingly is moving from its academic and theoretical origins onto political and governmental arenas where its implementation is being studied and debated, offers an opportunity for citizens and voters to bring into being this simple but to the eyes of our current society perhaps utopian idea(l).“ ...many spiritual traditions talk about ‘the space between us’ even calling it ‘sacred’. “ says Leandro Herrero. I make mine, his words. The space between us and the monad, money, can be sacred too. The world, can be sacred, is sacred. I am ready for drawing holy messy utopias, and with that move on, move on.
The dream of the dragonfly, collage and drawing over paper, Dreamscapes Artist Book, 2017, Maria Lusitano
Move into where no one has gone before.
“Here the birds’ journey ends, our journey, the journey of words, and after us there will be a horizon for the new birds.” Mahmoud Darwish
essay-collage, London, 2017, Maria lusitano The essay-collage is part of the project dream economics. www.dreameconomics.com