general introduction to the exhibition

Retrotopia: Design for Socialist Spaces is a collaborative research and exhibition project focussing on the multilayered development of the design landscape in Central and Eastern Europe and ex-Yugoslavia during the period from 1950 to 1990. With their extensive research efforts, the collaborators behind Retrotopia are offering a new view on the global and decolonial history of design.
Organized into eleven ‘design capsules’, eleven co-curatorial teams from Tallinn, Vilnius, Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, Brno, Bratislava, Kyiv, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Eisenhüttenstadt, and Berlin have brought together highly diverse projects that deal with the design of private and public spaces. Retrotopia: Design for Socialist Spaces was guided by a number of key questions. For example, how was the designing of living environments conducted in the formerly socialist countries between Tallinn and Zagreb? What role did ‘design’ play in the discourses and practices caught between between futuristic optimism and humane environmental design? What were the societal challenges that confronted the designers, and what were the visions that guided their work?
The exhibition has been further contextualized by the Retrotopia Archive: in a kind of dissection of the research, it outlined the networks of people and institutions while also highlighting the most important international exhibitions, training centres, and other platforms, thereby illuminating the framework within which the designers operated, shared ideas, and presented their projects and works. The Retrotopia Archive makes clear that there was a lively and networked design practice not only reaching across the former Eastern bloc and ex-Yugoslavia, but also penetrating what György Péteri called ‘the Nylon Curtain’.