"Une sorte de Pompeî inversée". Asger Jorn e la costruzione dell’utopia situazionista

Abstract

Asger Jorn’s artistic and theoretical contribution constitutes a critical response to modernism and functionalism, which profoundly shaped the cultural landscape of the twentieth century. Initially drawn to Le Corbusier’s idea of a “synthesis of the arts,” Jorn soon questioned the reduction of creativity to purely functional purposes, exposing the contradiction between the ideal of progress and the loss of individual inventiveness. From this reflection emerged the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and, later, the Situationist International, within which he developed a conception of utopia as a concrete and experimental practice capable of influencing everyday life and redefining the relationship between art and society. This perspective finds tangible expression in his house and garden in Albissola, where murals, ceramic fragments, and irregular structures shape an antiutilitarian environment in which the critique of functionalism becomes a shared sensory experience. In Jorn’s work, utopia becomes a form of life grounded in play, freedom, and collective participation—offering a poetic and political alternative to capitalist rationality and modernist orthodoxy.