from-the-future

Exploded City, From the Future

exploded city We attended an exhibit at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, an installation by artist Ahmet Öğüt.

This city is from the future. It’s called The Exploded City. Those who live there have emigrated from faraway lands, with dreams of traveling to the future. When they realized that there was no finding the future, they decided to build this city. It is said that hundreds of different languages, such as Otesian, Bosnian, Albanian, Kurdish, Castilian, Irish, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Anglo-Frisian, and other Saami, Altaic, and Slavic languages are spoken in this city. These people who don’t speak each other’s language, instead of creating a lingua franca, have learned to communicate through looking into one another’s eyes. Not before long, they taught me this eye language as well. In this city, all the other remaining languages are like a constant background noise. They actually resemble the besieging of the city by various types of birds. — Ahmet Öğüt

Exploded City's Buildings and Vehicles:
Madimak Hotel, Sivas, July 2 1993
Europa Hotel, Belfast, 1972-1994
HSBC Bank, Istanbul, November 20 2003
Ferhadija Mosque, Banja Luca, May 7 1993
Mostar Bridge, Mostar, November 9 1993
Water Tower, Vukovar, August-November 1991
Future TV station building, Beirut, May10 2008
National Library, Sarajevo, August 25-26 1992
Post office, Prishtina, April 8 1999
Tikrit Museum, Tikrit, March 27 2003
Beslan School, North Osetya-Alania, September 1-2-3 2004
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma, April 19 1995
Paddy’s Pub, Bali, October 12 2002
Maxim Restaurant, Hayfa, September 4 2003
Palestine Authority Foreign Ministry, Gaza, July 16 2006
Al Mamoon Exchange and Telecommunications Center, Baghdad, July 2006
Club El Nogal, Bogota, February 7 2003
Trident-Oberoi Hotel, Mumbai, November 27 2008
United Nations Building, Algiers, December 11 2007
Wedding house, Kakaral July 1st 2002; Kandahar, November 6 2008
Islamic University of Gaza, December 29 2008
Clinic Center Dragisa Misovic, Belgrade, May 20 1999
Stagecoach Bus 30, London, July 7 2005
Commuter Train, Madrid, March 11 2004
Renault 19, Semdinli, November 9 2005
Truck Ford D1210, Susurluk, November 3 1996

Ahmet Ög˘üt’s Exploded City (2009) envisions an imaginary metropolis comprising real buildings, monuments, and vehicles from across the world. Plucked from their original contexts in Turkey or Ireland, Yugoslavia or Great Britain, India or the United States, Lebanon or Spain, they coalesce as a single urban center in an installation of scale models and in a text that weaves each site together through experiential description.

In this, the work directly channels Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a book of fantastical descriptions of cities visited by the explorer Marco Polo. Polo’s narrations are barters of the imagination given to the emperor Kublai Khan, of invisible cities, seen only by Polo during his travels, and willed into existence for Khan through narration. In great detail, language allows Polo to supersede the logic and limitations of architecture and physics and to imagine cities whose logic is borne not through function but through imagination. Similarly, Ög˘üt’s Exploded City is an impossibility —buildings separated by distance and time made into a whole that defies reality — placeless and timeless.

8;üt’s description the city is a vibrant metropolis, full of life, with one of everything and three hotels. There is a mosque and a library, a bar and a club, a museum and a university, a federal building and a bank; there is music and drinking and dancing and a wedding. But as these mundane activities unfold, they do so in and around projections into the future of more unusual circumstances — a hotel that will burn to the ground, a wedding that will be bombed, a school that will be raided, a bus that will explode. And the logic of this city becomes apparent, where these sites of terrorism and violence have been reconstructed together in the moments before their devastation.

These questions of visibility and connection, of what and where in the world becomes visible to us and how, which sites across the world can be linked together, is also implied in Exploded City’s conjuring of buildings in their pristine state. When we speak of the whole world, as Exploded City does, we cannot speak of collective consciousness without some self-consciousness. But acts of terrorism and violence are episodes in which the connections between places, between politics and daily life, between the individual and the larger world, nationality and war, are thrown into sharp relief. And we are made to see these places that for most of us never existed in our consciousness, and how they connect to ourselves, in concrete terms of war or policy and in abstract terms of fear and empathy. In these moments, the variables of distance, speed, and time that keep us from knowing these places through our own experience collapse.

Resource: Enjoy diversity and travel; hotel coupons are available.

Exploded City, From the Future

More Articles