"Betraying Utopia"
Narrated by Jassem Hindi
Sound and Mixing by Jassem Hindi
Cover Design by Victor Timofeev
A utopia is a suspended locale, a space without time, extracted out of the mud of life. This canonical, western acceptance, is a suspicious object of desire - dis-incarnated; bodies are designed, pacified, or idealized. It is an island where time is suspended, and thus transformation is excluded. What happens when we re-introduce time, when we betray Utopia’s intent?
To unlearn what “Utopia” could be/become, Jassem Hindi is using historical, conceptual and speculative strategies. This audio narrative consists of two parts, it is a soft introduction to wide research on “Betraying” utopia, and on “Slimy” utopia. This means using utopia as a political practice that is not about projection (waiting patiently for the future) in a linear, progressive timeline (what is possible according to what we know) - our strategy is to fragment utopia into smaller pieces and disseminate those fragments in our present practices. In art, Utopia is not ‘yet to come', it is a now: a poem written in times of war is direct access to utopia, a pharmakon in times of hardship - that is the effectiveness of utopia, its potential for immanence, for betraying the dis-incarnated, idealist version.
Texts by Reza Negarestani, Benedict Singleton, Sun Ra, CA Conrad, Etel Adnan and others.
Merci Andrea Novac, Merci Lesia Vasylchenko, Merci Sina Seifee, Go raibh maith agat Ruairi Donovan.
This work is dedicated to the loving memory of Alina Popa.
Jassem Hindi is a Djeddah-born performer and sound artist based in Norway. He is an independent philosophy researcher, studying the double-bind of haunting and hospitality. His recent artworks have been focused on the physical relation between performance and death poetry, as a space for a collective political and environmental practice.
