Utopia is Possible

What might have been a conventional professional meeting became, in the Spanish context, an unprecedented event. For three days, what the ICSID did in Eivissa was not just an open congress where professionals and students could meet and debate; it was a point of convergence between design and the most experimental forms of art and architecture at the time in Spain. The exhibition organized by MACBA and curated by Daniel Giralt-Miracle and Teresa Grandas, La utopía es posible. ICSID. Eivissa, 1971. - Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), is an attempt to recreate that event and the ideas that are still relevant today: sustainability, participation, solidarity, new relations between industry and society, and the liberating powers of art. It includes documentary material, photographs, and films, from various archives and from the MACBA Collection.

In 1971, the ICSID Congress was held at Cala de Sant Miquel, a bay on the northwest coast of Eivissa, away from the usual urban venues. The Congress wanted to avoid any kind of programming on principle. It was structured in the form of 'speaking rooms' (in the two hotels on the bay), where presentations and discussions on design, urbanism, art, new technologies, and ideas took place.

In parallel to this, a series of events relating design to other media were also organized. One of the most successful was Instant City, a project created to provide accommodation for students attending the Congress. Carlos and Fernando Ferrater Bendito, then students of architecture, wrote, along with Luis Racionero, the Manifesto of the Instant City. The manifesto, which was widely published, appealed to participate in building a city that would build on the work as a communication vehicle. José Miguel de Prada Poole, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, specialized in inflatable architecture, provided technical expertise to enable the project: an ephemeral city, made of plastic, and based on a simple construction system of geometrical figures. Cylinders and spheres were interconnecting and could grow as needed. The Instant City claimed the collective work as an inseparable from leisure, just as a way to create new forms of coexistence based on creativity.

The congress´opening dinner consisted of a colorful ceremony organized by the artist Antoni Miralda, Jaume Xifra and Dorothée Selz, in collaboration with Carles Santos, in front of an orchestra. Artists and audiences were confused by the figure of the participants. Muntadas and Gonzalo Mezza created Vacuflex-3, a mobile sculpture made from an industrial green plastic tube over 150 metres long. It became a playful object with which it was possible to sculpt in a spontaneous manner: art could be a game. Josep Ponsatí installed a large inflatable sculpture made of big white plastic balloons, which measured forty metres in length at one point. Being in constant movement, the organic forms kept changing. It was a different way of looking at art.

The Congress was an experiment in socialisation, an example of how communal work, vitality, intellectual reflection, and leisure can be used to promote dialogue, and of how imaginative proposals can be created to structure new models of behaviour. As José Miguel de Prada Poole said when referring to Instant City, the ICSID Congress in Eivissa was proof that 'utopia is possible.'

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Activities

Thursday 21 June, 7:30pm
Round table
Utopia is Possible. ICSID. Eivissa, 1971
With José Díaz Cuyás, Daniel Giralt-Miracle and Teresa Grandas
MACBA Auditorium. Free admission. Limited seating.

Monday 16 July, 7:30 pm
Special guided tour
With commentary by Daniel Giralt-Miracle and Teresa Grandas
(exclusive to the Friends of MACBA)
Museum galleries. Limited places.

Autumn 2012

Workshop and action with architecture students to build a fragment of Instant City

Museum spaces

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