Monument - Fragment of an Approaching Past

Monument - Fragment of an Approaching Past is a sculptural mass of metal and glass inspired by the houses in Drop City, a utopian, pro-technological artists’ community of the 1960s in Colorado. Precursory in the areas of solar energy and communication, particularly with its reflection on a network foreshadowing the Internet, Drop City inspired many artists’ communities which followed. Its inhabitants lived in geodesic domes, many made of recycled and assembled car hoods. Charrière reconstructed an identical geodesic dome, before undertaking the radical gesture of flattening it with an excavator. The sculpture carries two melancholies within it: that of the failure of the “American way of life” symbolized by the car hoods, and that of the impossibility of going back to the counterculture of Drop City. However, they do not mean the renunciation of utopia. For the artist, the transition to two dimensions is a way of making a clean slate of the past and these geodesic domes become a backdrop enabling us to imagine new contemporary utopias.