Wandering through the Future (installation)

November 2006. Sharjah. Vast living areas stretch out from the city into the desert to provide a temporary home to many of the migrants who have come to work in the property industry in neighbouring Dubai. Houses and shops have been fitted with air conditioning systems to cool the desert heat and produce artificially tempered habitable zones indoors. Outside, the slow but constant leakage of water from the units provides enough moisture to create unplanned habitats for tiny patches of green. These scattered small oases seem like figments of the imagination, miniature mirages projected onto the barren landscape.

Dubai. A fantasy of the ultimate, hypermodern, global metropolis materializes in the desert. Gigantic, grandiose construction projects tailored to attract affluent foreigners are underway everywhere. Huge billboards, spanning entire blocks, not only hide the building work from view, but also project an imaginary skyline and a corporate vision of a fabulous future onto the city. ‘History Rising’ and ‘Live the Infinity’, the advertising slogans prophesy, using a promotional language that appears to borrow directly from the world of blockbuster science fiction films.
While a future Dubai in the image of this genre s constructed, the strict censorship in Sharjah does not allow such films to be screened.

While the billboards that visualize the ambitious horizon of a future Dubai aim to convey faith in boundless economic growth and technological might, they thus actually take their inspiration from a cinematic imagination that already harbours the nightmare of collapse. Using visual references such as the code of the Matrix – which in the 1999 film signified an illusory dream world conjured up by an inhumane system – to promote a property project, seems paradoxical at least. With the same conviction as the real estate public relations machine, the blockbuster taglines announce reverse scenarios: ‘The future could be history’, ‘The biggest disaster in history is about to arrive’, ‘Plan Your Escape’.



Wandering through the Future consisted of a stage, which combined the cinematic imagination of real estate billboards with the image of a green oasis. A structure that mimicked the way the billboards form a wooden screen onto which virtual impressions of an ideal city can be projected, was painted in chroma key green – a colour used in cinema for backdrops that allow actual people to be edited into augmented or virtual realities. Passersby were invited to step into this bright green space, and imagine their own ideal scenarios.

The stage was placed in the courtyard of the Sharjah Heritage Museum, located in the architectonic heritage area of the city, where life size models invite visitors – mainly tourists – to imagine an idealized past.