T&T (Tyler Brett and Tony Romano).

T&T (TYLER BRETT AND TONY ROMANO) OVERSEA/UNDERGROUND NEON GALLERY, BROSARP AND ARRIVAL, KULTURHUSET, STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

It could be a scene from a Mad Max movie. Through a burnt and deserted landscape, on his way to what seems to be a simple water tower--or possibly a makeshift power plant, cunningly put together from various pieces of hightech wreckage--a wanderer is approaching, his wheelbarrow filled up with useful things. A hub cap, for instance. A former exhaust pipe. Junk, as we would say.

In the works of T&T (Tyler Brett and Tony Romano) we are close to a historic freezing point. Their elaborate drawings and model landscapes-shown in two different exhibitions in Sweden--present the traces of an ecological catastrophy which has forced the surviving remnants of mankind to start human culture all over again. Forced by the revenge of Nature to obey the demands of sustainability, people settle underground--although in houses that very much ressemble today's suburban prefab architecture--where they form a new, nomadic civilization out of the remaining driftwood of industrial society.

What makes the world of T&T different from most post-apocalyptic entertainment visions, however, is their almost scientific method. With a fascinating exactitude they combine fragments from the affluent culture of our time--such as car bodies or engine parts--into absurd, complex and yet at least in theory functional entities, which serve only the most basic needs in life. Like heating, or drinking water extracted from an outhouse after several steps of filtering; hardly profitable from our perspective, though probably feasible. Even the underground suburban villas are, as far as I understand, meant to be fit to actually live in.

This adds a peculiar realism to their vision. Most distinctly it appears in the exhibition at Neon Gallery in Brosarp--in the far south of Sweden--which is the richer of the two. This is also where it becomes clear that T&T are more than just partaking in the revival of the utopian which forms such an important undercurrent of today's art--partly as a reaction against media art and a dominant documentary tendency, and partly, I think, as a way out of the contemporary trap. T&T sharply turn the favourite myths of our time inside out: Against "the end of history" they're offering its ground zero, against the idea of a vital "underground culture" they're projecting a physically subterranean form of life.

It works effectively on various levels: As a utopia, as satire--but also to provoke thought about our relationship to different parts of our own civilization. Perhaps the car body is more reasonable as a church steeple than as a means of conveyance? Is the electric guitar such an indispensable resource that you really might consider a woodheated version? When you seriously start to pose to yourself these kind of questions you know imagination is for real.