Members of the utopian community of Llano del Rio, as unseen by Aldous Huxley, who lived next to its ruins years after, 2009
Sculpture, bronze
26 x 45 x 18 cm

The small bronze statuette Members of the utopian community of Llano del Rio, as unseen by Aldous Huxley, who lived next to its ruins years after showsa group of women wearing men’s work clothes. It takes its inspiration from a photograph of these anonymous members of the Llano del Rio community, whose women had the right to choose their occupation, posing in front of the hotel they were helping to build. Set up by the politically disillusioned Job Harriman and run on lines acceptable to all members, this socialist community was born in 1914 in the middle of the Mojave Desert in California.
Its rough and ready treatment makes the statuette look like a period piece: like some vestige of a past buried under sand and disenchantment and referencing a snapshot taken back when everything still seemed possible.
Shortage of water soon forced the community to move to Louisiana, leaving behind it an entropic landscape dotted with what would become the ruins of the original utopian project.
Years later writer Aldous Huxley lived not far away. Despite his near-blindness, the author of Brave New World showed himself to be a visionary in his critique of the notion of progress. He described his reservations about the Llano del Rio project in “Ozymandias”, part of his collection Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Bettina Samson’s  Llano del Rio pop-up (Ozymandias) uses a copy of Huxley’s book as the starting point for a pop-up, a symbolic, scaled-down reconstruction of the ruins of the community. Out of the pages bursts a paper structure, an atrophied souvenir of an ambitious project abandoned even before it was completed.

Text by Anne-Lou Vicente in “Bettina Samson”, La Galerie, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec (exhibition 5 December 2009 – 13 February 2010).

Photography: Cedrick Eymenier.

 

 

© NETTIE HORN