威廉·莫里斯美术馆新展《人间乐园》探讨如何在住宅中“激进地生活”

一场关于“谁的故事被讲述”的展览

伦敦沃尔瑟姆斯托的威廉·莫里斯美术馆推出新展《人间乐园：英国的激进生活》，把家庭空间作为观察点，梳理18世纪末以来英国人如何在住宅中挑战社会规范。展览的叙事框架来自厄休拉·勒古恩1986年的文章《小说中的载体袋理论》：人类早期历史常被讲成猎人用矛刺倒猛犸的故事，有行动也有英雄，而采集食物的人被边缘化；勒古恩认为最早的工具可能是容器而非武器，故事也可以像袋子一样把多个人与想法聚在一起。展览据此把家视为勒古恩所说的“另一种更大的袋或包，一个装人的容器”。

楼上楼下：财富支撑的实验与出于必需的居住

楼下展厅聚焦家居物件与非传统生活方式，展签与新闻材料点明金钱和阶级如何支撑这些实验。莫里斯本人的住宅就由父亲在德文大康索尔斯铜矿的投资支撑，而那座矿的工作条件远非乌托邦。展中还有1947年艺术家玛奇·吉尔在东哈姆家中被织物环绕的照片、德里克·贾曼确诊HIV后在邓杰内斯的住所“希望小屋”，以及肯尼亚出生诗人哈丹比·阿萨拉切1981年买下伦敦南部的575旺兹沃思路、用19年以回收松木手工雕花覆盖墙面的居所。楼上转向因困窘与必需而生的激进住房：刘易舍姆由黑人主导的自建合作社“Fusions Jameen”，成员投入逾1000小时体力劳动换取折扣租约，主席蒂姆·奥肖迪称之为“汗水产权”，并在展览图录中说“你不该出于贪婪去建造，你是出于需要去建造”。

被争夺的室内空间

展览把不同处境下的居住经验并置。丹妮尔·拉马尔什1980年代拍摄的东伦敦孟加拉裔占屋者照片，与英国艺术家德莱恩·勒巴斯的委约新作相连；勒巴斯取材罗姆人传统，把绘画、表演摄影与行动文件拼成大尺幅拼贴，其中一张照片在玩具房车上写着手写便条“如果我是辛迪娃娃，你会更爱我吗”，以代表常规家庭理想的娃娃追问顺从能否换来被剥夺的权利。苏尼尔·古普塔1990年代中期的数字蒙太奇《侵入2》取景于他与伴侣合住的伦敦家中，把厨房改造与关系破裂联系起来，并叠合日常生活影像、同性恋图像与南亚文化物件，如玛杜尔·贾弗里的食谱封面；古普塔称这呈现了“家庭空间也可能是一个被争夺的文化场所”。

与硅谷乌托邦的对照

展览也把历史上的激进实验与当下科技话语并置：一些以社会主义为底色的居住尝试，如今在硅谷的乌托邦修辞中找到回声，科技富豪常把工具说成集体富足的引擎，文中以OpenAI首席执行官萨姆·奥尔特曼关于“今天看来难以想象的共享繁荣”的承诺为例。文章提出的质疑是，这种愿景常略过财富究竟为谁生产、以谁为代价。与之相对，展览中每一项集体行动都扎根于具体地点；策展人哈德里安·加拉德在新闻稿中称，展览考察家如何成为挑战社会规范的场所。

Long before Silicon Valley promised frictionless, universal solutions to how we live, people in the UK were re-imagining domestic life and the conditions of living from the ground up.

These forms of radical living, whether individual choices or wider movements, were born of dissent, necessity and the desire to live in ways society otherwise sought to restrict. This includes expressions of sexuality, religion, politics and identity. Some began as attempts to create households that escaped prevailing conditions of oppression. Others pursued utopian ideals or organised political campaigns enacted through the very conditions of everyday life.

What the state treated as radical was often, for those living it, the basics of a stable life and an attempt to escape oppression. Though their alternatives were often precarious and sometimes short lived.

Earthly Paradise: Radical Living in the UK, a new exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, explores how people, places and ideas connect. The show aligns with author Ursula Le Guin’s critique of history by questioning whose stories get told and who tells them.

In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Le Guin argues that early human history is usually told as a hunting story, centred on a man with a spear bringing down a mammoth. “That story not only has action, it has a hero,” she explains. For this hero, “the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there”. Meanwhile, the people gathering food are sidelined.

Le Guin argued that the first human tool was probably a container used for gathering, rather than a weapon. Building on this idea, she suggests that stories can also function like carrier bags, gathering multiple people and ideas together rather than focusing on a single hero.

Earthly Paradise at the William Morris Gallery follows this thinking. The show explores how the home, which Le Guin calls “another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people”, has served as a space to challenge societal norms since the late 18th century. Indeed, Le Guin explicitly lists “the museum” as one of her essential containers, alongside “the medicine bundle” and “the shrine”.

A container for people

The lower gallery focuses on domestic objects and unconventional ways of living. Exhibition labels and press materials highlight how money and class enabled these lifestyle experiments.

Many radical domestic projects relied on substantial wealth, including Morris’s own, which was funded by his father’s investments in the Devon Great Consols copper mine – a venture built on far from utopian working conditions.

A 1947 photograph shows artist Madge Gill surrounded by fabric in her East Ham house. Nearby, photos of Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman’s Dungeness home following his HIV diagnosis, sit alongside images of 575 Wandsworth Road in south London, created by Kenyan-born poet Khadambi Asalache. After buying the house in 1981, Asalache spent 19 years covering its walls with hand-cut fretwork from reclaimed pine. Together, these images show the home as a refuge, nurture and creative space.

Read more: Why the Dungeness landscape is so inspirational for writers and artists

Upstairs, the focus shifts to radical housing born of precarity and necessity. Fusions Jameen was a Black-led self-build cooperative in Lewisham. Members contributed over 1,000 hours of manual labour for discounted tenancies. It’s an arrangement the group’s chair Tim Oshodi termed “sweat equity”. Oshodi notes in the exhibition catalogue: “You shouldn’t build out of greed; you’re building out of need.”

The show traces connections from Danièle Lamarche’s 1980s photographs of Bangladeshi squatters in east London to a new commission by British artist Delaine Le Bas. Drawing on her Romani heritage, Le Bas combines painting, performance photography and activist documents into a large collage.

One featured photograph shows a toy caravan above a handwritten note: “If I was Sindy would you love me more?” Here, the Sindy doll represents conventional domestic ideals, questioning whether conformity would gain Romani people their denied rights. While children view toy caravans as symbols of freedom, the rightwing press often frames them with prejudice.

Sunil Gupta’s mid-1990s digital photo-montage Trespass 2 is set in the London home he shared with his partners. Bringing his work indoors into the kitchen, Gupta traces how a kitchen makeover by a third party contributed to his relationship’s demise. He layers images of daily domestic life with gay iconography and south Asian cultural artefacts, such as a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook cover. The work highlights, in Gupta’s words, “how a domestic space might also be a contested cultural site”.

By bringing these disparate struggles together, Earthly Paradise highlights the diverse experiences shaping contemporary life. It demonstrates how modern living frequently echoes historical ways of life, albeit under evolving social and political conditions.

Somewhere in particular

The radical experiments of the lower gallery, several of which foregrounded socialism, now find an echo in the utopian rhetoric of Silicon Valley.

Tech billionaires often present their tools as engines of collective abundance. This is typified by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman’s promises of “shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today”. What this tech-utopian vision routinely leaves out, however, is the question of for whom this wealth is actually produced, and at whose expense.

That promise of emancipation through technology is made to everyone and to nowhere in particular. By contrast, every collective action depicted in Earthly Paradise is rooted in a particular place.

In the exhibition’s press release, curator Hadrian Garrard states that the show examines how the home acts as a site for challenging societal norms and explores “what the possibilities are for this in today’s world”.

That ambition could readily extend to a digital exhibition space. Rather than reinforcing online hate and conspiracy, a digital gallery could demonstrate how networked platforms foster collective organisation and grassroots change. Without the possibilities such counter-spaces afford, our homes will increasingly be shaped by Silicon Valley’s radical ideologies – leaving us with ways of living we never actually chose.

Peter Ainsworth is affiliated with UAL LCC