Encyclopaedia Utopia

1990
mixed media

2015
three-channel video installation, headphones, 31′40′′, 26′46′′, 25′56′′
Commissioned and produced by CONTOUR 7

In this new video installation commissioned by CONTOUR 7, Nedko Solakov browses through the pages of his own Encyclopaedia Utopia, which he made in 1990 shortly after the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In the three videos, corresponding to the three volumes of the original encyclopaedia, the artist reflects on his own work twenty-five years after completing it. Solakov lists and reads all entries aloud while holding a camera in his hands, providing commentary on his own work and the ideas that inspired him at the time. The three books, compromising variously sized drawings, texts and photographs, are exhibited in front of the corresponding videos. In the books, Thomas More’s ideal island merges with the equally utopian experiment of communism in Bulgaria. Oscillating between a bitter ironic, funny, vulgar or naively pedagogical tone, the encyclopaedia becomes an occasion to irreverently mock both the literary and the actual version of the consummate society. Between the numerous drawings of imaginary creatures and eerie monsters, Solakov included rules and guidelines for a ‘happy and harmonious’ collective life.