I'm an artist and researcher. My ongoing research delves into emancipatory rural reconstruction movements between ca. 1890 and 1940 that are specific, emergent, and transnationally networked negotiations of the high-modernist agenda. My research may offer valuable insight into modernist utopian ideas and attempts at their implementation to re-evaluate them for our present future. Shedding alternative and peripheral perspectives on the more prominent urban and industrial modernities, and especially in their entanglement with top-down state-led, colonial, christian missionary, or philanthropic rural reconstruction (preparing for developmentalism), the movements and materials I have been looking at draw an enticing image of experimentation (or the ‘real-life laboratory’) as a modernist paradigm itself. As part of this research I have visited archives across Western Europe so far and am hoping to be able to also visit archives in India, China, the Philippines, Taiwan, the US, and Canada.
If after reading this you want to get in touch, please feel free to do so. Exchanging about these questions is the best way to learn more, so I'd be happy to hear from you!