low res promises on high res screens (2020) (video upon request)
The “High Res Promises On Low Res Screens” video installation is
a 3-channel fiction documentary that tells the story of a resident of
Nur-Sultan/Astana, in which she reflects on her visions and memories
of the “spectacular” city, capital of Kazakhstan.
Astana is listed as the most futuristic city in the world. The work reflects the future- competition between nation states and showcases the reality and the costs of spread promises to disseminate ideas of the future.
Astana is listed as the most futuristic city in the world. The work reflects the future- competition between nation states and showcases the reality and the costs of spread promises to disseminate ideas of the future.
The abstract complexities of the current geo-political climate of
spectacular future urbanism are narrated and sympathised through the
perspective of a resident of Nur-Sultan/Astana.
The story and images
are developed together with residents and former residents of the city.
The channels represent three different stages, the past, the present and
the promised future.
How can a city be of the future and exist in the present? What happens when all these times are mixed up? When the void of the future is more important than that of the lively past? When the past is cleared away for a future? When that held out future never manages to arrive? And you’re left with a beautiful promise in the rubble?
How can a city be of the future and exist in the present? What happens when all these times are mixed up? When the void of the future is more important than that of the lively past? When the past is cleared away for a future? When that held out future never manages to arrive? And you’re left with a beautiful promise in the rubble?
New modes of producing and thinking about design processes
This method is investigating what it means to fictionalise your own life story, self-organise a script– fictionalise a documentary to question reality and oppose the modelled and predicted render you are supposed to play an agent in. Collective storytelling and imagining the future through individual and specific scenario's and narrators.
It is this reflective effort of agency i am interested in. Giving importance to alternate modes of living and experiencing, allowing the other excluded stories to exist and understanding, re-modelling or de-modelling these dominating constructed standarts that are only made for the few. I try to look for friction between politics and poetry in stories.
Through this experimental filmmaking we wanted to feed the generic future thinking designs an antidode of poetic stories of the lively past, taking an apple tree as a symbol of maybe a better image to represent the future. This partly fictionalised antidode is also problematising the unreal estate of the future owned by the technocrats, futurologists, and designers who have engineered our collective imagination. They have been homogenising narratives that shape our fantasies and possibilities. What does the future entail for us, do we still have agency in shaping the future and our imagination?
