Goran Sergej Pristaš - Practicing the Impossible

100 years have passed since two artists were presiding over their self-proclaimed temporary states: Gabrielle D’Annunzio in his proto-fascist Italian Regency of Carnaro and Ernst Toller in his Bavarian Soviet Republic. These failing states represent two attempts at institutionalising poetic imagining with detrimental consequences, either on the population of the state (Rijeka) or the artists and their fellows (Munich). Both regimes are considered utopian attempts today, but the question is: what can we and our institutions learn from artists practising the impossible at a time when utopia seems to be more a matter of memory then of imagination?