U:TOPOS

U:TOPOS is a field of my artistic practice connected with the search for my own place and with the attempt to consciously situate myself within a space where I found myself by chance.

Utopos emerges from the difference between an accidental geographical place and a place into which a person situates themselves through their own thought and action. This place does not exist in advance. It appears through the process of conscious presence, through attempts to locate oneself within the surrounding environment and to establish one’s own relations with it.

The first such accidental place in my immigration was Avallon. Gradually, I began to work with it as material: through spatial interventions, exhibitions, routes, observations, encounters, and collective actions. These works do not so much depict or describe the place as become ways of my presence within it.

U:TOPOS exists in several connected forms. Utopos 22 is a model of an exhibition space, first realized through the transformation of a studio into a place of exhibition. U:TOPOS biennale is a long-term artistic project unfolding in Avallon and involving other artists and residents of the town. One of its main principles is the translation of artistic intentions into instructions and the subsequent execution of these instructions in the urban environment.

The U:TOPOS biennale (Avallon, 2027) brings together research into the urban environment, work with routes, maps, conversations, and documentation, as well as artistic interventions in public space.

U:TOPOS does not designate a fixed territory or a completed project. It is an ongoing process in which an accidental place gradually becomes a place of conscious presence and action.