METASITU
TDCU IZZ
The chronicle of increasing isolation of a group of artists attempting to reach the World's most remote human inhabited place, the island of Tristan da Cunha.
THE VISIT
Meziara is a village in Northern Lebanon, where most of its residents do business in Nigeria for most of the year, before returning every summer. The suburb to an invisible city.
TORA BORA
The extraction and export of 'Jerusalem Stone' is one of the most lucrative businesses in the Palestinian Territories, and remains highly unregulated. Everyone wants a piece of the holy land.
MEMENTO LOCI
Souvenirs are tokens that help to perpetuate spatial narratives. Mass produced around the world, they serve as a vehicle through which power narratives are unfolded and displayed.
MEMENTO LOCI unpacks some of these strategies.
14th DISTRICT
Slavutych was built to rehouse the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It is made up of 13 districts, each inspired by a different Soviet city. With 86, we are building a new district based on Athens.
STOP OVER CITY
Moscow City is a decaying business district in Central Moscow. By linking it to the two largest airports in the city and giving it the status of 'international transfer zone' we would revitalize this vacant territory.
STATES, STATUS,
STATUES & STATUTES
VDNHk park in central Moscow is a spatial technology that serves to advance an imperialistic idea based on an old regime.
(re)appropriating (post)soviet narratives.
NATION STATE OF MIND
Nation State of Mind proposes an alternative understanding of the nation in a post-national world. What is the role of territoriality and locality in Ecumenopolis?
#mariupolwillnotdie
#itistheworldthatwillend
Mariupol is a mono-industry town in Eastern Ukraine. Its population has been shrinking since the collapse of the USSR. This is a manifesto to embrace its shrinking condition and work with it.
EXPEDITION TO ECUMENOPOLIS
Expedition to Ecumenopolis is a series of workshops that we deliver to different groups in order to collectively think about ideas evolving around contemporary urbanism in the age of hyper-globalisation.
VOCABULARY FOR ECUMENOPOLIS
In the era of Globalization and the Antropocene, we find that there are a new set of urban qualities/phenomena that take place globally. Here is a glossary that attempts to identify some of those.
<
>
States, Status, Statues and Statutes is a video that was commissioned for the Russian Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2016. We were invited to reflect on the future of the VDNHk park in Moscow. VDNHk - Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy - is a former Soviet expo site that was inaugurated in 1939 as a propagandistic tool to broadcast the achievements of the Soviet Union on the backdrop of a deep crisis in the country.
It is a large territory spreading over 230 ha and encompasses 400 buildings that are used as fair, exhibition, entertainment and commercial spaces today, many of them still representing the states that previously constituted the Soviet Union. VDNHk has been confronted and shaped by numerous tumultuous events in the Soviet Union, and later, the Russian Federation, mirroring the changes in societal, political, and economical structures.
‘States, Status, Statues and Statutes’ reveals how VDNHk park is used as a spatial technology to advance Russia’s imperialistic agenda even today with new regeneration plans under way. The video is a critical reflection on the appropriation of the term “post-soviet” and how it can be used as a vehicle for delivering a new form of propaganda with the same imperialistic goals over control of the territory disguised under a different political mask.
The narrative is built around a fictional imaginary, where the site is deliberately left empty in the hopes of being used again, of reviving the imperialist and ever-expansionist dream of today’s Russia: in the hope that one day the pavilions would be used once more as they were during the soviet times: to show examples of excellence from all corners of the empire. The domain of power, the realm of expansion. At the same time, it shows the absence of it all, on how it is in reality a hollowed sovereignty, reflecting on the state of emergency Russia finds itself today.
ECUMENOPOLIS
STATES, STATUS, STATUES & STATUTES
VDNHk park a post-Soviet ruin and a future wish.
Video Essay/3’29’’ ----- 2016
US