As an exhibition and publication project Proxima Utopia is envisioned as a "world atlas of utopias" in the era of post-everything. Perhaps following a cycle (and anticipation) of global crisis developing today, architecture finds itself again drawn to utopias. However, as today our understanding of modernities has become multi-centered and simultaneous, we are witnessing also several deviant ways in how future societies are being pursued. Proxima Utopia represents a project for an atlas that seeks to provide speculative cartography and imagery for these developments. It is not as such a "mappa mundi", consisting of what we currently know of the world, but more of a design-led inquiry into the "other" directions that global development might take - with or without the benevolent and harmonious past understandings of utopias. While not potentially desirable, the scenes discussed in the atlas seem yet plausible, deriving from current global politics, power relations, economy, surveillance, the post-internet and the looming ecological changes - the real contexts of future architecture.

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bostjan, March 18th, 2017