Thrutopia - art & design for regenerative futures, exhibition vernissage by Niels Devisscher
Featuring the work of collage artist and designer Niels Devisscher, Thrutopia exhibits artworks that emerged from five collaborations with regenerative change-makers, each responding to these times of collapse and renewal in unique ways.
While dystopias tend to leave us powerless and paralyzed, utopias present idealized and often unattainable images of the future. What they both fail to do is help us imagine what Stuart Kauffman called the ‘adjacent possible’, or a set of immediate possibilities that are within reach from where we are today, to help create the desirable world we long for. That’s why we need Thrutopias.
Coined by Rupert Reed, Thrutopias are both indicative and suggestive. They lay out a map and articulate the core ingredients of a world worth aspiring to. Rather than sidestepping complex challenges, a thrutopia works through them head-on. As Reed writes: “We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul. Visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.”
Since Niels Devisscher co-founded Sympoiesis with
Rūta Žemčugovaitė, developing the collective respons-ability to metabolize loss and regenerate living systems, has been at the heart of everything they do. To revitalize and renew, we also need to develop the ability to work through what we’ve lost, and to make the emotions that have become calcified fluid again. It’s an ecological process that is elemental, psychic, alchemical, and always sympoietic. And it helps us reconnect to our imaginative source of aliveness and our deepest desires from which we draw insights and motivation for what’s uniquely ours to do. It is what Bill Plotkin calls Soulcraft, embracing “our yearning for individual personal meaning and a way to contribute to life, a yearning that pulls us toward the heart of the world.”
Thrutopia is at the heart of Niels’ art and design collaborations with leading regenerative organizations such as Regenerators.co, Really Regenerative CIC, and Arising Quo. They waymark the world between worlds — between the unraveling of modernity and the more beautiful futures our hearts know are possible. Working from essence and energy, he generates images that approach our times through the lens of archetype and myth. Using old magazines and books, the collages gesture towards what it feels like to inhabit thresholds, hold dualities, co-inhabit place with our more-than-human kin and evolve alongside them.
The exhibition is part of ArtSpring 2026, a yearly festival that celebrates art in Berlin Pankow. C*SPACE is excited to present selected works by four artists from its hub community, kicking off the Weekend of Open Ateliers with the vernissage of “Thrutopia” by Niels Devisscher as a highlight.
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Program
Vernissage “Thrutopia” by Niels Devisscher: May 29.
18H: Doors open
19H: Welcome address by the artist and C-SPACE co-founder Katja Hellkötter
ArtSpring weekend @ C-SPACE: open Saturday, May 30, and Sunday, May 31 from 10-20H
Further works on view during the weekend include:
“Building Dexterity” by Michelle Howard and her students from the Academy of Art and Architecture Vienna, presenting results from their research of the site at Langhansstraße 86/85, where C*SPACE Creative Hub is located in the former furniture factory Bruno Springer
Visions for its future, a poster exhibition by award-winning illustrator Yimeng Wu
Typography works by Roman Wilhelm, head of the UdK Typo Lab
More info on C*SPACE: www.c-space.eu