Visions of Urban Landscapes

22/11/2021, h. 14:15 – 18:25
Piattaforma Webex

The City in the Image / Arabian Transfer

The seminar will stage a dialogue between two books: “The City in the Image” (by Davide Tommaso Ferrando, vibok works, 2018) and “Arabian Transfer” (by Michele Nastasi, Hatje Cantz, 2021). From the disciplinary perspective of architecture criticism and photography respectively, the authors explore the idea that urban images – as expressions of the way we understand, represent and transform the city – are always a political fact. “The City in the Image” wonders about the enigmatic relationship between the recent and brutal transformation of the suburban landscape under the pressure of financial urbanism and the codification of the city in Western culture visual memory over the past five centuries, reading both the sophisticated images of the digital age and the ones created through traditional media as the visual manifestations of deeply intertwined systems of territorial, social, cultural and media-related factors. “Arabian Transfer” highlights the transitory condition of six cities in the Arabian Peninsula – Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai, Kuwait City, Manama, and Riyadh – representing them as new global epicentres made possible by a condition of hyper-mobility of people, cultural models, images, finances, and goods, transferred from one place to another, in which extreme and paradoxical form it is possible to recognize the global contemporary condition to which we ourselves participate.

Relatori: Davide Tommaso Ferrando – Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Michele Nastasi – architectural photographer
Discussant: Claudia Mainardi – Politecnico di Milano

Responsabile: Gaia Piccarolo