KIOSK-MONUMENT / 2019 / BERLIN

AFTER LENIN AFTER CAPITAL reimagines the material language of ideological collapse as a portable structure - part souvenir kiosk, part monument to erasure. Being built from lightweight aluminium tubing and scaled to match the dimensions of tourist information booths found across Ukrainian cities. 

Over the past decade, Ukraine has undertaken a systemic effort to erase symbols of its Soviet past: Lenin statues have been dismantled, mosaics defaced, and streets renamed. Stateless plinths, yellow-and-blue paint interventions, and layered signage pointing to both past and present toponyms have come to mark the nation‘s shifting relationship with history. 

Simultaneously, the rise of souvenir kiosks across public squares signals a parallel form of narrative construction - one where cultural memory is flattened into tokens, mass-produced and sold. Within this context, AFTER LENIN AFTER CAPITAL stages a fictional kiosk of decommunisation. Each of its faces is draped in black-and-white banners - collaged fragments of Soviet iconography, discount aesthetics, and avant-garde references - that speak in the fractured language of historical revision. Lenin-branded thermoses, amputated flagpoles, ruptured slogans and tourist graphics converge into a speculative marketplace of ideological residue. It is a kiosk for a history in flux - a speculative infrastructure for a future already liquidated.

VIDEO WORK / 31’25“ / 2017 / TRISTAN DA CUNHA, ANGRA DOS REIS, CABO FRIO

Framed as a deconstructed reality TV show, TDCU-1ZZ documents and reflects on a failed expedition to one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth: Tristan da Cunha, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic Ocean. 

What begins as an artist residency transforms into an introspective chronicle of a journey aborted - a voyage adrift in search of a destination that remains elusive. The work traces both the lived experience of the participants onboard and the historical context of Tristan da Cunha itself. 

Central to the narrative is the island’s postcode - TDCU 1ZZ. In 2005, the island’s governor petitioned the UK House of Lords to change it to a more recognizably “British” postcode, aiming to improve access to online shopping platforms like eBay and Amazon for the island’s residents. This seemingly mundane bureaucratic detail becomes a symbolic entry point into questions of connectivity, coloniality, and global logistics. 

As the film unpacks the paradox of isolation and connection in the digital age, it draws parallels between the distant island and the artists aboard the ship. Despite the omnipresence of global networks, both are suspended - one in the vastness of the sea, the other in the complexity of geopolitical peripherality. 

TDCU-1ZZ becomes a meditation on access, abandonment, and the strange disorientation of being in motion while going nowhere - a failed arrival that reveals the invisible structures shaping our movements, borders, and desires.

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3-CHANNEL VIDEO WORK / 7’06“ / 2015 / BEIT FAJJAR, HEBRON,  SAO PAULO

Tora Bora refers to the fine layer of dust that clings to skin and clothing after a visit to a quarry. From November 2014 to January 2015, we conducted fieldwork across the West Bank in Palestine, tracing the production, distribution, and symbolic charge of Jerusalem Stone. Through visits to numerous limestone quarries, we uncovered the geographies of extraction. 

One small quarry near Hebron was the source of the largest single export: slabs used to clad the world’s largest Pentecostal church in São Paulo, Brazil. A mountain in Palestine had vanished, and its absence became legible halfway across the globe, where the ‘positive’ filled a sacred void with political weight. This interplay speaks not only to global economies of supply and demand, but of occupation, deregulation, and resource exploitation that shape the Palestinian stone industry today. In a striking circumvention of trade restrictions, the stone was imported into Brazil as a ‘holy object’ - usurping its religious aura to bypass import taxes on construction materials. 

The act reveals a broader neoliberal tactic: the instrumentalization of mythology and belief systems to sustain transnational extractive infrastructures. The resulting work is narrated from the perspective of the dust itself. It is both residue and witness, sediment and storyteller, speaking to the entropic poetics of displacement, labor, and power inscribed in stone.

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VIDEO WORK / 3’39“ / 2016 / MOSCOW

States, Status, Statues and Statutes is a video work commissioned by the Russian Pavilion at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. We were invited to reflect on the future of VDNHk - a vast exhibition park in Moscow originally inaugurated in 1939 as a propaganda tool to showcase Soviet achievements during a time of crisis. Spanning over 230 hectares and comprising more than 400 buildings, VDNHk has since transformed into a hybrid zone of fairs, exhibitions, leisure, and commercial activity. 

Yet beneath its veneer of cultural programming lies a strategic deployment of space - an imperial technology repurposed as an instrument of territorial ideology. Through a critical reading of its ongoing regeneration, the project explores how the language of the “post-Soviet” becomes a vehicle for new forms of soft propaganda - rebranded aesthetics in the service of enduring imperial ambitions. 

The narrative unfolds within a speculative imaginary: the site is left deliberately vacant, awaiting the revival of a dream that never fully dissolved. It anticipates a return to the park’s original function - as a stage for imperialistic display, exhibiting models of excellence from across a territorial expanse. It is both a monument to expansion and a mausoleum of a hollowed sovereignty. In this emptiness, we read presence. The absence becomes indexical of a broader state of emergency - a sovereign spectacle haunted by its own obsolescence.

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VIDEO WORK / 8’54“ / 2015 / VIENNA

Memento Loci examines the culture of souvenirs, with a particular focus on Vienna. Around the world, public spaces in tourist enclaves are saturated with standardized trinkets objects that, rather than reflecting the unique character of a place, reduce it to a consumable commodity. 

These souvenirs, stripped of their mnemonic value, function as medals of presence contemporary equivalents of the passport stamp for an increasingly mobile global class. Far from being innocuous keepsakes, souvenirs participate in the legitimization of dominant spatial narratives. 

Their mass production and distribution underscore choices about what is remembered and what is excluded. By reproducing specific buildings, figures, or slogans, they establish hierarchies of heritage, deeming certain elements of the built environment more significant than others. In doing so, they sustain narratives projected onto urban space by specific groups during particular historical moments. 

In Vienna, for instance, the majority of souvenirs represent a narrow 150- year window, erasing the complex, layered history of a city that spans more than two millennia. Memento Loci proposes that souvenirs are not merely ornamental or nostalgic they are totemic objects that shape how space is socially constructed and perceived. They mediate the relationship between visitors, inhabitants, and the heritage of place, reinforcing global patterns of spatial commodification.

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VIDEO WORK / 7’41“ / 2014 / VLADIVOSTOK, BEIRUT, NOVI SAD, MADRID, MOSCOW

Vocabulary for Ecumenopolis is a video essay that proposes a new urban lexicon grounded in a foundational concept of our practice: the Ecumenopoliss - a planetary urban condition, continuous and borderless. 

In this work, we identify a set of urban phenomena that we see as symptomatic of this emerging global city. These are not isolated conditions, but recurring patterns: real estate bubbles, hollowed-out commercial properties, privately owned public spaces - sites and situations that can be transposed across geographies. 

By naming these processes, we aim to draw attention to territorial strategies that unfold simultaneously in multiple locations around the world. The terms are illustrated through footage gathered during field research and on-site encounters in Lebanon, Serbia, Russia, and Spain - regions where the effects of global urbanism manifest in distinct yet interconnected ways.

From Speculative Urban Share to Attic for Trophies, each phrase captures a fragment of the Ecumenopolis, mapping a lexicon that resists invisibility. 

New Urban Terms: Speculative Urban Share Voided Development Holes Vehicular Entertainment Zone Discount Emptiness Empire Subversively Expanded Boundaries Attic for Trophies

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VIDEO WORK / 8’33“ / 2014 / MEZIARA

As part of a group of artists invited by the Temporary Art Platform, Beirut and the local municipality of Meziara, we were asked to envision alternatives for an industrial site soon to be relocated near the village. 

Meziara one of the wealthiest communities in Lebanon remains largely uninhabited for most of the year. It comes to life only during the summer months, when its diaspora returns from across the globe. In The Visit, we propose a speculative future scenario that reimagines Meziara not as an isolated mountain village, but as the suburb of an invisible city - one shaped not by its architecture, but by the transnational networks of its diaspora. 

The village owes its current form to remittances and influences from Meziarans who emigrated to Brazil, Benin, and Nigeria over the past century. Its contours are sculpted through absence, shaped by elsewhere. The cord - an invisible infrastructure of global financial flows, telecommunications, and migratory routes - is what sustains Meziara. It exists not only as a geographic location, but as an externality and objective of broader social and economic circuits. 

Our proposal for the industrial site envisioned a place where “Meziarans of the World” could reassemble - a hub for reconnection grounded in the belief that as long as the threads between Meziara and its far-flung diaspora remain intact, the village will endure. It is a site rooted in distance, yet tethered by belonging.

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VIDEO WORK / 8’42“ / 2014 / MOSCOW

Stop Over City is a speculative exploration of the future of Moscow’s International Business District located just four kilometers from the Kremlin. Under construction for more than two decades and with a vacancy rate exceeding 40% in 2014, this hyper-dense cluster of skyscrapers home to Europe’s tallest buildings remains an unfinished vision. 

A patchwork of offices, retail spaces, residences, hotels, and leisure facilities attempt to animate a district still seeking purpose. Our proposal reimagines Moscow City as the heart of a Mega Airport: a terminal without planes. 

By connecting Sheremetyevo and Domodedovo Airports through this zone, Moscow City becomes a new kind of International Transit Area visa-free, extra-national, and legally liminal. A jurisdictional loophole, a competitive node in the global flow of people, goods, and information. 

Questioning Randian and Libertarian ideals, the space would not only accommodate global flows but also shelter those who fall between legal categories. With its infrastructure already in place Moscow City could evolve into a paradoxical space: both terminal and threshold, sanctuary and surveillance zone. 

A subversion of the Ecumenopolis, and, simultaneously, its material manifestation. At once a non-place and a lieu-de-memoire. It is a proposal for a new typology of place: one born of hypermobility, deterritorialization, and the poetics of pause.

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PERFORMANCE / 25’07“ / 2017 / BRUSSELS

Tinderpolitics explores the sociopolitical implications embedded within digital dating platforms - specifically, the contrasting architectures and affective economies of apps like Grindr and Tinder. Through actual encounters and dialogue-based performance, the work unpacks the subtle and not-sosubtle agendas that each platform enacts and sustains, and how queer and straight courtship unfolds. 

In an age where desires can be satisfied with a swipe, the interface of dating apps mirrors broader cultural shifts - where immediacy, efficiency, and short attention spans shape not only romantic encounters, but also political systems, voting behaviors, and public opinion formation. The gamification of intimacy reflects the gamification of governance. Though seemingly homogeneous at first glance, each app operates through distinct modes of intensity, rhythm, and expectation. These differences point to divergent models of subjectivity and interaction - narratives made visible through performance. 

Dating apps transform the relationship between consciousness and sensibility. The exchange of signs becomes increasingly desensitized, shifting from conjunction - deep, embodied relation - to connection: a punctual, repeatable, and disembodied interaction governed by algorithmic logic. In this transformation, Tinderpolitics traces the affective infrastructure of contemporary desire and its political reverberations.