Oleanna Space/Ship/Station
2003

Commissioned for the Fiftieth Venice Biennale

With the Oleanna Group (Nanna Debois Buhl, Tamar Guimardes, Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen, Christina Hamre, Molly Haslund, Nynne Haugaard, Ulla Hvejsel, Charlotte Bergmann Johansen, Line Skywalker Karlstrom, Karoline H. Larsen, Jens Hultquist Laursen, My Lindh, Per Nystrom, Kasper Akhoj Pedersen, Mia Joo Vo Rosasco, Mille Rude, Annesofie Sandal, Julie Sinding, Ulrika Sparre, Nanna Starck, Maria Werger, Lilach Weiss Zach, Erik Akesson), the FLEAS Collective (Daniel Blochwitz, Jill Dawsey, Deborah Kelly, Ellen Moffat, Horit Herman Peled, Martha Rosler, Trebor Scholz, Mary Jo Walters)

Guests: Yale group (Leslie Hewitt and William Cordova, Nayia Frangouli, Rachel Mason), Kirstin Dufour and Finn Thybo Andersen, Artists Against the War, Matteo Ballarin

Architect: Andrew Herscher

Rosler was invited to participate in a curated exhibition, Utopia Station, within the Venice Biennale. The site was the newly opened garden of the Arsenale. She invited some thirty collaborators to work with her—students of hers at Yale and in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Florida, among others. In a yearlong effort, they constructed a network of investigations, initiatives, actions, and performances suggested by the idea of utopia. They designed posters and banners, wrote manifestos, and produced videos and other works, and with the help of an architect, designed and built an "unfinished" building. The Space/Ship/Station held exhibits, wall works, television monitors, issues of the group's newspaper Follow Oleanna, and a seminar cloth for use during the Biennale, with pillows embroidered with slogans such as "Every Tool Is a Weapon." The title refers sardonically to Oleanna, a failed nineteenth-century utopian community of Scandinavian farmers in Pennsylvania, but the project refers more broadly to attempts to fashion harmonious communities, real or science fictional.