Fetishizing the Future / Zeppelin Museum
Fetishizing the Future
Dec 16, 2022 – Apr 4, 2023
Zeppelin Museum
Friedrichshafen, Germany

The transdisciplinary exhibition Fetishizing the Future. Utopias of the third dimension at the Zeppelin Museum discusses visions and ideas from the last 120 years for overcoming gravity in a variety of ways and for optimizing the necessary technologies. Airships and air taxis, civil Hypersonic Aircraft, flying cities and space settlements: historical and current technical and socio-political utopias are juxtaposed with artistic positions that question them, envision alternative scenarios and reveal their dystopian potential. The exhibition focuses on the question whether technical innovations can fulfil the human desires for speed, freedom, peace, immortality and sustainability, or whether their significance is exaggerated by marketing and fetishized promises of salvation.

Behind airships, drone taxis, civil Hypersonic Aircraft, flying cities or space tourism, we often find simple human longings. Shaped by a strong belief in technology, marketing and the desire for progress, utopias develop, but so do their counterparts, dystopias. The exhibition Fetishizing the Future. Utopias of the third dimension examines for the first time the intertwining of technological and societal utopias and raises the question: Can technology save the world – or is it rather an instrument of power and a marketing promise? For this, the exhibition starts in the past with the history of airships and looks into possible futures with works by contemporary artists.

Speed, freedom, peace, immortality and sustainability: these five main chapters structure the exhibition visit and enable a critical examination of past and present visions of a more livable future.

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