proposal for a city

Proposal for a city

How we perceive and experience the city and the built environment is an omnipresent question not only within the photographic field. Architecture and the urban structures of our surroundings influence our daily movements and interactions, as well as our visual perception and not too rarely how we feel within urban spaces. Facades, architectural materials and promotional banners articulate past and present, but also a future that has yet to be built. To whom this present and future belongs and who is addressed by it is an important question in thinking about urban space.

In my work proposal for a city I concentrate on aspects of urban (re-) development, to what extent a photographic examination of the topic must be related to reality and truth and how a fragmented dialogue can shape a visual idea.

Locations of de- / construction shape a visual focus of my work and are documented analogue and digitally and manipulated in the further digital practice. De- / Construction as process is transferred into the image space in order to question aspects of the documentary and to put them in dialogue with subjective perception.

Another aspect are 3d representations displayed on construction posters, on buildings that are currently being built. Predominantly depictions of residential buildings are shown in our urban surroundings. Rendered people inhabit the representations of the future space. Tenants will be addressed and represented even before the building is completed and inhabited. Mainly white, heteronormative and in conservative family structures.

By taking photos of the renditions and reassembling them with digital algorithms, the motifs and represented ideas and ideologies are deconstructed and brought back to the original material. Placed in contrast with photographs depicting urban excerpts of construction an idea of a city in flux is proposed.

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For the Landskrona residency I would like to further explore the photographic notion of loose narrative and associative structures in relation to memory. A place that I do not have a particular connection with, other than knowing of the fotofestival, and that I have never been to is an interesting starting point to think about memory. Especially of the memory of my birth place that my parents left when I was around the age of four. How can I incorporate a place I do not know in this practice and thinking would be something I would focus on during the residency.