Monumental wasteland
A Post-Industrial Urban Paradise
Developed as a competition entry for Shenzhen Biennale “Eyes of the City” (2019) the project asks what futures our augmented vision will paint when waste becomes ubiquitous and dump sites migrate from the city's edges into its center. It interrogates whether these technologically-rendered paradises will remain collective or grow individualized, and for whom—or what technologies—our urban environments will ultimately be reshaped.
Scope
Visual Design & Production
Team
Pareid Architect
Duration
1 Month
Year
2021
About the Project
Speculation towards an inevitable future points towards increasing production, consumption, and waste. Countless lands have taken on a new nature, where junk sites are populated with a genealogy of our technological innovations, wants, successes and failures, creating new fossil typologies to be excavated. Currently, such sites are pushed to city peripheries so as to delineate the areas of metropolitan living and what can be considered its residue, resonating with the familiar idiom ‘out of sight, out of mind’. In the near future, when dump sites become parts of our city, when visiting such sites becomes a new form of attraction in itself, and when the augmented eyes of the city can render a chaotic mash of cracked porcelain, rusted metal and tangled wires into an ideal paradise.
This proposal explores questions such as what type of paradises will our augmented and virtual realities paint for us? Will they continue to be collective or individualized? What role will junk play when junk is everywhere? How will our urban environments be transformed? And for whom or what technologies?
