Provisional Urban Forms
Walter Benjamin asserts the importance of material presence to understand the city. In The Arcades Project, he includes direct quotations from Siegfried Giedion's early work Construction in France to describe a modern iron and steel architecture, railroad stations, exhibition halls, winter gardens and department stores. However, by focusing on all kinds of decorative features in and around buildings, Benjamin goes beyond Giedion's purist (placeless and timeless) modernism. He recognizes in the ephemeral elements "material of vital importance for us … In any case, material of vital importance politically; this is demonstrated by the attachment of the Surrealists to these things, as much as by their exploitation in contemporary fashion." The spatial elements that emerge within ephemeral urbanism: stalls, draperies, and decorations, as well as containers, tents, and fences, collapse 'cities of dream,' to use Benjamin's notion, with cities of painful actuality exhibiting the political, social, economic, and environmental disparity of our world.
The installation includes carpets printed with satellite images of various temporary cities, as well as documents, books and sound on their material forms, politics, sociologies, economies, and aesthetics. These heterogeneous urban forms are spread across the globe, but are all characterized by ephemerality. On the carpets they are related and confronted: a refuge with a festival, a market with a military camp. While these forms often share materials and structures, they exhibit the inequity that exists between the North and South, between citizens and non-citizens, between the Oktoberfest and Talad Rom Hoob, a railway market in Thailand.
The sound contracts field recordings from heterogeneous ephemeral urban phenomena taking place remotely but often simultaneously. Throughout one year, sounds from different temporary cities across the globe, a festival in Germany (Oktoberfest) and a celebration in India (Kumbh Mela), overlap with noise from a railway market in Thailand (Talad Rom Hoob), a military camp in Afghanistan (FOB Lightning), and an extraction site in Chile (Chuquicamata) etc.
Listen to the audio piece on SoundCloud
Spatial intervention, printed carpets, audio installation, 2017
Does Permanence Matter?, curated by Rahul Mehrotra
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich 2017
