The publication of Atlas Europe Square is funded in part through an exclusive numbered edition of 30 posters created by Mettler, featuring an exhaustive as possible list of Europe Squares. For more information, Mettler can be contacted on yvesmettler@theselection.net.
Holding together the continent of Europe in symbolic unity is an expansive network of Europe Squares, generic pockets of empty space in which the shaky idea of a unified European political identity is both contested and made concrete.
Text by Guy Mackinnon-Little
Since 2003, Swiss artist Yves Mettler has sought to answer a deceptively simple question: where is Europe? To do so, he launched an investigation into the vast numbers of Europe Squares, Places de l’Europe, and Europaplatzes scattered across the continent, sites where the concrete environments of various urban centres are connected – often somewhat haphazardly – to a loose abstract idea of Europe and the symbolic values that it bundles together. In wide-ranging projects that take in fictional surveys seeking the “ideal” Europe Square to simple, humorous documentation, Mettler’s work reveals the awkward misalignment between the ideality of Europe and the public infrastructure in which it is made tangible. The book, Atlas Europe Square, forthcoming from Urbanomic, assembles Mettler’s vast project, featuring extensive photographic documentation, texts by the artist and additional essays from Reza Negarestani, Teresa Pullano, Laurent Thévenot and Stephen Zepke. The following extracts from the book showcase two of Mettler’s projects, a collection of postcards accumulated from various public squares and a fictional tour of the “Europacity” to come. ◉
