L’avenir

In April 2011, Jordi Colomer presents new work at the Centre for Fine Arts, BOZAR in Brussels: L’Avenir (The Future), a large-scale project based on Charles Fourier’s 19th-century Phalanstère. Fourier did not draw detailed plans for this utopian building, which was never built; in his writings, however, he planned and described it in great detail. It was intended to offer its chosen inhabitants a life and an environment painstakingly constructed on the basis of the harmony of time and space and of their characters and enthusiasms.

The culmination of Fourier’s thinking and his persistent dream, the Phalanstère seems, in many ways, to bring together the ideas that Colomer has been exploring since the beginning of his career. For the artist, however, this is very much about the future. These untold fictions, these ideal worlds that overcome their contradictions to kindle the conviction of the imagination, are the aesthetic sources of a political liberation yet to be achieved. They are the adventures that Colomer has always presented, whether in films, models, photographs, or installations. Grandiose fictions that reveal possibilities and that turn the most ordinary of people, whether active citizens or just spectators, into pioneers in unexplored territory. A high-definition epic that concludes with a festive meal on a peninsula in the Ebro delta to the south of Barcelona, or that other inexhaustible mine of images and unfinished fictions, the Internet.

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