The City Is Ours: Things to Look For Along the Way

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

How often do you really look at what you see? The way we walk and live in our cities has changed dramatically in the last 10–15 years. In 2008 Facebook surpassed Myspace as the most-visited social media website. With the introduction of Live Feed and the spread of smartphones, most of our attention has shifted from looking at our surroundings to looking at our screens. Because most people's attention is on what is happening on their screen, the city has become a place of unnoticed things and stories waiting to be discovered. Every city has an endless source of visual stimuli: multiple layers of traces of people's movements, activities and intentions, and accidental events, all waiting to be documented and creatively analyzed. Questioning how we can observe our cities and what we can find in ordinary urban environments has become the main focus of my art practice. Since 2017, I have used books as the principal format of my work. This allows me to escape from the "white cube" and to make my works more accessible to a broader audience. At the beginning of this year, I initiated a three-year publishing project "The City Is Ours". Halfway between a book and a magazine, it is a series of six bi-annual bookzines designed, curated, and produced by me, and distributed worldwide by IDEA books (Netherlands). In each issue I analyze a specific detail related to the streetscape through a visual essay. Photos combined with diagrams and short stories are used as a communicative tool: to help bring an awareness of our surroundings. By inviting the reader to look at our built surroundings deeper, I wish to demonstrate that anything can be more interesting than it seems to be.