147 Contribution to La Biennale di Venezia, 6. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura: Sensing the Future. The Architect as Seismograph

The video project was originally designed for the exhibition “Enquête sur l’Architecture Proche”, a survey of contemporary architecture, which was to be mounted at the Centre Pompidou in 1997. Our project was well advanced when the ambitious exhibition had to be cancelled due to budgeting problems. The project was so important to us, however, that we decided to proceed although we had no idea where it would lead us. For a long time, we simply followed the images, a flood of images, which we organized like a library. Although fascinated by the magic of these images, we did not know at first what we were actually looking for: namely, pictures of the contemporary city.

From the formal view point this video consists of a journey around a city through the eyes of a camera that provides a picture in real time of image fragments connected in association, which condense into the portrait of a false city of the present. The raw material consists of images and fragments of films – both well and lesser known – and television news bulletins. Although some we have already seen, we had not perceived or understood them in such a direct relation with our notion of a city of the present. What images are they? Beautiful images, ugly images, images of destruction – both visible and invisible, yet perceptible – real and false images, from news bulletins and cinema studios. Could there also be other images? Certainly, though wholly different ones; among the innumerable ones appearing on our screens, only few we took on board or recorded, because they expressed something that we hadn’t known before. Images that let themselves be detached from their original context, from their previous content within a film or a TV new story and that could enter a new context. They no longer needed to recount a story, neither to transmit facts; they didn’t even need to put forward a theory, nor to expound a thesis on the city of today or even tomorrow. They are images that represent the urban reality as a perception of reality, images that describe the process of perception as a type of strategy for urban survival. Sometimes only extremely brief fragments –almost traces of images that let us see a new way –that are able to cast doubt on a presumed certainty. Sometimes they are longer clips that almost present an action, where real men seem actors (Sarajevo scene) and where the actors seem real men (Dennis Hopper scenes) in this false city of the present.
Herzog & de Meuron, 1996