The Idealized City

The Idealized City is an large scale inflatable sculpture, created with stock-images and renderings that are commonly used online, advertising and marketable contexts, presented for the first time on The World Islands archipelago off the coast of Dubai. The Idealized City is a multidisciplinary research project and exhibition created after an extensive investigation into local culture, urban and architectural specificities of the United Arab Emirates and the Gulf Region at large, started in 2021 as an ongoing project on contemporary landscapes and identity. From a Western perspective architectural references have been a necessity for the perception - or narration - of who we are. How are these necessities changing in Mega Cities and new development of the globalised world? We live in an age where the majority of the population live in newly developed areas, also in those countries with a more consistent relation with identity through historical artefacts: small differences can be found between Chinese and American suburbias, Russian and Khaleeji new developments, European and Latin America commercial avenues or malls, not to talk about leisure facilities from the Mediterranean area all the way to South East Asia. City centres and historical heritage became open air theme parks for the fruition of cosmopolitans - the majority of the local population moved out long ago, rendering these areas a representation of themselves. This opens the window for considerations on what is the meaning of ‘authentic’ nowadays, and furthermore what’s the grey area in between reality and representation on which narrations are built and messages propagated; in an era where where even the idea of truth is challenged and a big part of our perceptive experience is based on digital environments, how can we embrace impermanence and absence of references to the past for the creation of a playground allowing future methodologies to emerge?