Wishful Thinking

Article: Wishful Thinking

Public Anagrams

Public Anagrams is based on the manipulation and subversion of mainstream slogans describing well-known public art and urban development paradigms and strategies, such as “smart cities” or “urban regeneration”. By mixing up letters and by turning upside-down the slogans, the artist aims at raising critical awareness about the hidden outcomes of urban development strategies. Slogans […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Social media faces

Today there is a social network for everything. There is one for sharing lol cat memes, another for checking out your friends’ party photos and one for posting latest CV updates. Sometimes, we put on our serious face for a skype interview and other times we publicly rant about a delayed flight using an angry […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Microbial Money – Stock Analysis

The current finance and banking system is often considered unchangeable and uncontrollable. It is often mystified and presented as having a life on its own. Could other ways of looking at finance help us see the flaws that rule it, independently of the form it takes? What if we imagined money as living organisms? What […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Housing is a Human Right

Following this year’s Habitat III, it is worth remembering that “Adequate shelter for all” was one of the two key issues of the previous Habitat conference in Istanbul. Ten years later we are looking at an even deeper housing crisis that does not only embrace homelessness and growing population of urban slums, but also growing […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Ziggurat, East, Summer

Vacant spaces are often considered ownerless. Detroit’s Fisher Body Plant 21 has been abandoned for more than 30 years. When Scott Hocking constructed a ziggurat structure out of 6,201 wooden floor-blocks inside of it, it’s devalued and deteriorated state has been called into question. It seems to have awoken a desire to control that space. […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Risk Theme Park

Playgrounds are terribly dangerous places. As a child, you might fall down, scratch your knees, break an arm and you will definitely get dirty. This supervised exposure to danger is considered necessary for the healthy development of a child, but as we grow older we become more risk averse, both individually and as a society. […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Landscape with crane rooms and keg apartments

What does it mean to live together or in isolation and what extent of isolation renders a common future impossible? Both architecture and technology allow us to create and regulate the interfaces of interaction between each other and our surroundings. In this landscape, Aristide Antonas builds a post-apocalyptic vision where our minimal existence is focused […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

State of Exception

The objects left behind in the desert by undocumented migrants on their journey to the U.S. are the unnoticed traces of the human experience of transit. Forced and illegal migration may receive a lot of attention in the media and political debate, but on a human level, it often remains distant and is rarely discussed. […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
Xavier Delory - Pèlerinage sur la Modernité

In a state of decay

Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye embodied the modernist utopia of the Machine for Living. The beginning of the last century was marked by optimism for the future and the intention to shape the world according to everybody’s needs. From that utopian vision about living, Taylorism survived while humanism seems to have been left behind. What happens […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Treasure Island

Inspired by freeports where collectors store valuable artworks without paying taxes, Skye Yuxi Sun imagined a series of repository private islands in the River Thames. She pictured a place where the future extra-rich would  store, what could be the ultimate symbol of total triumph over life, death and nature – resurrected extinct animals. Even the […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

The Monument

Modes of urban authority traditionally seen to be wielded by the State, such as the production of public realms, provision of security, and administration of infrastructure, are now shifting into the hands of private corporations. In line with such erosion of state sovereignty is the emergence of a specific type of capsular urbanism – the […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
The White House by Ryan Mendoza

The White House

Ten years after the onset of the housing crisis, Detroit is still afflicted with emptiness and blight that it left behind. Ryan Mendoza preserved this part of American history by bringing an abandoned single family house around the world. What if we could make places so telling about the inglorious urban histories more prominent? Should […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Active Public Space, Plaça de les Glòries

Our relationship with machines in the digitized space is usually rather inconspicuous. All sorts of devices surround and track us without us knowing that they are there. Active Public Space is a project that imagines transformation of underutilised public spaces, in this case Plaça de les Glòries in Barcelona, and speculating on its future use […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Friction Atlas

Everyday, citizens perform, on public surfaces, synchronised routines of elaborate moves. As we move across the city, laws define movements and gestures, unconscious reactions, behaviours and anticipations. They are sets of instructions, conditional statements, ultimately incorporating power; a structural force that plays into everyday life. What happens when we redefine the rules as the visible […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Memory 02

Places often play an important role in shaping our memories. In a similar but reverse logic, spots that don’t exist in our memories seem not to exist at all. Forgotten spaces, whereabouts nobody visits and hidden dark corners fill our cities creating gaps that are in fact only mentally inexistent. In this series of sculptures […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Vacant Lot

When a development plan for an empty plot of land is being drawn, the plot enters a state of limbo where it is not any more an open space but already a construction that is about to happen. Yto Barrada’s photo freezes this moment of anticipation, where all imaginable visions for the future are still […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Liquid Citizenship

There are many reasons to question the form and the idea of citizenship today. On the one hand citizenship becomes something we tend to detach from by declaring our belonging either more locally, regionally or continentally rather than nationally.  On the other, it becomes a commodity as suggested by Femke Herregraven. Our multiple attachments to […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
Alles ist Kontext - Davide Tomasso Ferrando

Alles ist Kontext

Iconic buildings come to define cities’ skylines, contribute to their branding, and function as landmarks and status symbols. But what if we remove them from their direct surrounding? It is worth questioning whether the same buildings could maintain equal status in a meadow. Would they still operate as objects of admiration, when the hustle of […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

An unexpected breakdown of the advertising market

A contemporary horror vacui is occupying every available surface of our cities. Times Square is the symbol of an urban space becoming iconic precisely because the presence of advertisements has been elevated into an attraction in itself. The identity of the space is deeply dependent and affected by the content of the blinking screens and […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

The Art Living Project

For those who have never experienced homelessness first hand, it is hard to relate to those without a roof over their heads. Huge programs have been rolled out to take these people out of sight, either by criminalising or victimising them. With a rhetoric of individual responsibility prevailing, taking them out of mind is also […]