Coming Soon, 2011
Digital print on blue-back paper (244 x 208 cm), wooden structure (244 x 480 cm)
text See also: www.imiteme.com/leo
This project is informed by architectural simulations typically presented on large-scale hoardings. Often erected on brown-field sites surrounded by fences, these images promise architectural transformations packaged with a bright blue future. With “Coming Soon”,we mimic this convention but instead of an idealistic simulation we are presenting an impossible reality. By means of a “mise-en-abyme”, the photo of the site contains itself the way it is or, more precisely, the way it was at the time of taking the picture. The vertiginous effect of the image is due to the fact that it incessantly announces a future to come...
Arguably, our intervention presents a quite pessimistic view on urban developments. However, we are much more interested in the potential of these brown-field sites to be spaces for free imagination, where passengers can project anything they like. In this way, we attempt to protect the space from time and from any too concrete a simulation. Further, like in architectural simulations, our board displays a web address for “more information” (www.imiteme.com/leo), and in order not to disappoint the passer-by or spoil her fantasy, she would actually find, on the virtual site, exactly the same image as on the real site.