House of Eutopia: haunted house of an ideal society

'Eutopia comes from the Greek and means as much as 'Good place'. With this installation, I want to make people think about what that is: a good place.' Architect and visual artist Filip Berte worked on his 'Good Place' for seven years and the result can now be seen in Utrecht's Zijdebalen Theatre. His 'House of Eutopia' is set in the large shed of an old sawmill on the edge of the city centre, an area also known to Kyteman fans as Kytopia.

House of Eutopia is mainly about Europe, and what it has all been and doesn't really want to be. For his project, which now consists of a loose basement, a garden with four corners and the final house itself, Berte travelled along the frayed edges of Europe. The basement, with which the tour begins, is the place where everything we don't really want to know is stored. The concentration camps,former Yugoslavia: Berte turns them into peepholes, and that alone draws you figuratively into the performances. 'The visitor is free to look at it or not,' Berte explains. 'Just as in real life you have power over what you want to know and what you don't.'

Impressive in all its smallness is a model of Sarajevo's library, as it looked after Serbs set fire to the building with its irreplaceable collection of books and manuscripts. 'This is essential in my project,' Berte says. 'That library was my graduation project from my architecture studies. It was destroyed by order of the Serbs because it was also a symbol of the multicultural society.'

The garden at the House of Eutopia contains video footage and sound recordings of trips Berte made along some of Europe's striking border regions. You ride with him along the metre-high iron fence in Melilla, the Spanish enclave on Morocco's northern border. In the Moldovan city of Chișinău, he shows the huge differences between rich and poor in Europe's poorest country. Painful are the images of empty, dilapidated Soviet-era cultural centres. 'I wanted to show images of a purposelessness we cannot imagine. The youth there grow up without opportunities for a good future, and often without parents, because they all went to work in Europe to escape poverty. For them, there is little or nothing else to do.' Via Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, it's on to Brussels where refugees and asylum seekers wait homeless to join our European home.

A staircase leads to a platform with a panoramic mural of the Wall in Berlin, of which it is not clear whether it is being built or dismantled: 'I deliberately keep in the middle which places I depict. They are images from construction and dismantling, which together form a whole here.'

The roof is not missing, but only indicated by light bars. 'This is the exit of my project. It shows a space that has not been filled in, but is about how we ourselves are going to fill in this new space.' About the how, he prefers not to comment: 'I worked on this for seven years, and for seven years I was also always present among the public at every exhibition. Now it is ready and I give it to people. Those people go out with questions, and not solutions.'