Islands of Utopia!

ISLANDS OF UTOPIA

1___

In the silence of the dark pyramid strange human sounds are heard for the first time in ages. Who dwells in the secret space?

         Aaahh! Don’t move, you’re squashing me… Ow! My leg’s gone to sleep…

After several failed attempts to break free one from another, someone realised that if they all turned together in the same direction, the linen strips they were tied up in would begin to unravel. Turn, turn… and turn… that’s it!

          You’ve lost a lot of weight! – said one.

          I’m hungry, I feel empty – said another.

They looked around and saw some beautiful animal-shaped jars which contained their remains.

          With this perhaps we might be whole – they wondered.

Without thinking twice, they opened the funeral jars and began filling one another up quite randomly, until each of them had a brain once more.

3000 years had passed since Anubis carried out the collective embalming of our friends. Finally the court of souls granted them the passport to their new life. They remembered that fatal day on which the sun set and they no longer felt ticklish. But nothing of the world they knew remained. Only ideas traversed time. The planet they previously inhabited was no longer the same. Men forgot their gods and cut themselves off from the sky and its constellations. Now Egypt was a watery world from which a host of islands emerged.

Now a little more alert, they went outside and scaled the golden summit of the pyramid. From there they discovered their new reality.

Hapi, the god of the Nile, had flooded the desert with silt in order to create great wealth – they thought.

Hoping that the wind might once again caress their skin, our princes began their expedition across the world, aboard a papyrus ship, which would lead them to knowing these new and mysterious islands.

2.___

Guided by the stars, they again took an old route that led to the ancient field of tributes, and at once a swallow came to perch on the ship’s bow. They all foresaw the immediate arrival of the sun. The little swallow told them of the new cosmos, of how they now lived in great spheres in which the vegetation was lush and the animals lived together in peace, as in a utopia.

         Who thought of the idea? – asked one of them.

        We don’t know him, but it seems like it was an architect who came from the north called Rem Koolhaas, whose dream was to                     convert the desert sand into an oasis of harmony and peace – replied the swallow.

Satisfied with the reply, our travellers ceremoniously saluted the rest of the flock from the deck and carried on eagerly in search of other islands.

3.___

What happened next stirred up their restless spirits. In the distance, like something out of a dream, they saw some strange steel blocks, shining like the morning, walking through the deserts. It was a walking city. Something completely unimaginable for the architects of their remote era.

From the ship they were aware of an intermittent light that was trying to communicate with them. In charge of the city was a child who, with arms wide open, invited them to come up. Our friends drew their papyrus ship towards the shore and went to see that strange city.

The mayor, as the boy was called, spoke to them about the advantages of being able to walk without moving one’s legs and about how they had developed multiple arms, almost always eight, thanks to the scientific advances of a group called Archigram.

They had tea and biscuits there whilst the child told them about the queen of hearts who lived on a nearby island, where it was very easy to lose your head.

4.___

A little afraid of these miniature kings, our pharaohs returned to their vessel and set course for the wondrous land of Alice and its famous queen.

Precisely 40 furlongs from there, beside the Nile river plain, Akhenaten, the greatest of them all, made out 4 playing cards that were filling up their watering cans in order to water a rose bush.

They stopped to question the subjects. The cards, very distressed by their unruly queen, described how they had had to build their city with tape, since making houses of cards in the open air was extremely difficult.

Surprised and a little dismayed by the current building methods, they warned the cards of their impudence and foresaw for them a trial by the souls, in which their small hearts would weigh heavy, balancing them out with good actions. And nothing good would come of all that stuff about taping together the house of cards! The cards blushed and justified themselves by saying that they held themselves in great esteem and that, in reality, it had been a long time since they had played any tricks.

          Before we used to paint the white rose bushes red for the queen, but we don’t do that anymore – one said apologetically.

Nefertari, a devotee of bathing in asses’ milk, grew impatient and seeing that there was very little of the colour white there, encouraged her companions to head off once again for the channel and reach another place.

5.___

That’s how they came across the last island in the archipelago. The paper city rose up from the ruins of an ancient metropolis. Here, its inhabitants building as much of their most intimate desires as they wished. As you can imagine, our pharaohs were happy to find a city made entirely out of paper. After disembarking their vessel, a boy called Papun told them about Yona Friedman, the architect who laid the first roll of paper and whose dwelling they could still visit today. The house was clean, and inside the pleasant smell of paper enveloped everything.

Papun encouraged them to stay a while for shelter in the structure since, in the city of paper, it almost always used to rain ink and occasionally confetti.

They gratefully went into the structure and began to build their lives once more, and to draw like they always had on the walls. Very soon, they forgot all about the old Egyptian architecture which required such effort, sweat and blood, and that is how they began to imagine new utopias.

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The fairy tale «Islands of Utopia»  was a project in collaboration with our students for the Blankspace Project Competition / 2014.

To see pdf-file with credits and Spanish translation click here!