Looming environmental crises and recent cutbacks to environmental protections have me wringing my hands at our collective short-sighted behaviours. And yet, I can walk outside today in a perfect autumn in the Midwest, and I find it surprisingly easy to forget this elephant of a problem when surrounded by the beauty of the world. Maybe one thing I need is a visual confrontation with the future.

Clear streams of water, biodiverse forests and species, fresh air, lovely architecture, the thrum of a thriving village, I lament the loss of all these things when I look at Julian Mauve’s series ​“What’s Left of Utopia.” He presents an alternative but possible planet, where the colors have drained off into smog, and we’re left to make our way in the concrete ruins. Perhaps what we see is not a different planet, but rather a prophetic vision of the earth.

Mauve’s photographs are imaginative, but they’re not science fiction. He photographs a real place and its real decay. He stages his imagery near public housing projects, shedding the optimistic origins of those developments to reveal the downward arc of shattered utopian hopes. In this world, isolated humans persist in going out into the world, still trying to interact with the polluted environment.

Though the situation pictured here is not as severe, the photographs call to my mind some of the buildings destroyed in the Syrian civil war. Once lively dwellings have become crumbling shelters. Despite the dangers in that unfathomable environment, children still try to play among the loss. The presence of youth in particular make Mauve’s fable compelling for me. They are, after all, the ones set to inherit what we make of the earth.

-Lisa

​“This project acknowledges an impoverished landscape and loss of space due to the inhumanity of the structures we choose to build. In this mixture of grief and hope, the characters appear on the point of disappearing within the fog that engulfs those urban utopias, considered at the time of construction to be symbols of progress. Disembodied witnesses, they become actors in a play of which the ending is uncertain.”

– Julien Mauve

​“We desire our present civilization to advance steadily toward some kind of Utopia. The thought that it may decay and collapse, and that all its spiritual treasure may be lost irrevocably, is repugnant to us. Yet this must be faced as at least a possibility. And this kind of tragedy, the tragedy of a race, must, I think, be admitted in any adequate myth.”

— Olaf Stapledon

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