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Carmen: Utopias of Belonging is an ongoing research and exhibition project that explores the restless human desire to belong to something greater. Examining how bodies, landscapes, and stories are disciplined into canons, or quietly erased from them, the project embraces absence as a methodological strategy. Turning away from utopian narratives and the feeling of failure it opens onto unclaimed spaces and more realistic possibilities of belonging.

Developed by artist-curator duo Ieva Lygnugarytė and Meral Karacaoğlan the project proposes participatory ways of criticizing, expanding, and updating the European canon. Forgotten but meaningful gestures once meant to secure belonging are activated through contemporary artistic practice and curatorial inquiry, allowing the past to affect the present. 

Institutional Partnerships are held with the American Academy in Rome, the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Italy, the Lithuanian Cultural Institute.

For their counsel we thank Mr. Adam D. Weinberg, Director Emeritus, Whitney Museum of American Art; Mr. Maxwell Wolf, Founder, New Canons LLC; Dr. Edward Eigen, Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape and Architecture, Harvard GSD; and Mr. Theo Anthony, Filmmaker and Lecturer, Harvard FAS.