Dreamscape
Édith Roux
From a historical point of view, Shanghai has been the key city in China’s economic development, particularly over the last ten years when the urban landscape has been undergoing radical change. Shanghai has become one of my centers for experimental photography, starting with efforts to record the destruction of old parts of the city in 1995, then in 2002 with the use of photography to record the architectural developments typical of a country in the throes of massive changes.
Preview
A frieze is composed of photographs of urban-style architecture alternating with posters of idyllic landscapes covering the hoardings around the building sites; photography here appears in a context somewhere between documentary and fiction, offering an out-of-context blend of Swiss valleys and post-modernist complexes alongside Caribbean coves and inlets and dull, cosmeticized facades.
The frieze expresses both the march of progress and a hallucinatory vision of the world. Could it be the postcard of our globalized dreams, the perfect rampart around a territory of standardized architecture?
Commission: French Ministry of Culture and Communication, national center for visual arts [Centre National des Arts Plastiques]
