
Window on Utopia
Eduardo Galeano,
She is on the horizon – says Fernando Birri.
I walk two steps, she moves two steps away.
I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further.
As much as I walk, I will never reach her.
For what does utopia serve? It serves for this, to walk.
Walking Words
Utopias is a project born around a very simple idea, but increasingly difficult to accept today:
we are all migrants, in a way or another.
We prefer to call ourselves travelers, expatriates, digital nomads or tourists, but what we do when we move from one place to another, whether for pleasure, necessity, study or work, is nothing more than a migration. And this act, which often occurs almost without conscience, inevitably turns us into migrants. Obviously, without diminish those who move for dangerous reasons and not by choice: refugees, asylum seekers and displaced persons.
Why Utopias?
The choice of the word Utopias has a double value. We would like to narrate the utopias of the people we met on the road, or who found us. The utopias of the cultures and societies in which we have submerged for an hour, a day or a month. But we will use Utopias not only in the sense of ideal but also as “no place”, οὐ τόπος in ancient Greek. It is that no place where travelers, those who migrate, usually find themselves.
We also think that it’s important to use the word migrant as a provocation, in this historical moment in which being a migrant has almost only a negative meaning. Try to give back a positive and proactive meaning to the word migrant, which can be extended to any person moving from one place to another. If we are all migrants, nobody is a migrant, at least not in a pejorative sense.
This is our Utopia, a Migrant Utopia.
IRENE
Reporter
Italian. Specialized in conflict zone journialism, she has worked in different places such as the Zapatista community of Oventic, in Mexico, and Al Masara village in Palestine.
At this moment, she works with different online newspapers, especially on human rights issues and migratory flows.
LUCAS
Architect
Colombian. He worked as an architect in various communities in Colombia, creating classrooms, community centers and residential renovations. Some of these works have been recognized by the Colombian, South American and Ibero-American Biennial and have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2018.