travel-las-vegas-united-states-eiffel-towerAn exhibition entitledDreamlands. This exhibition tries to identify how international fairs, universal exhibitions and leisure parks have increased their influence on the way in which the city is conceived and designed. From an eminently critical perspective, the exhibition presents three hundred works (films, documents, modern and contemporary art, architecture) that explore the relationship between urban utopias and the configuration of themed urban models:

Sixteen sections will take you from the Venus Pavilion imagined by Salvador Dali for the 1939 New York International Fair to Learning from Las Vegas by architects Robert Ventura and Dense Scout Brown and Delirios New Cork by Rem Colas. Throughout the tour, the visitor will understand why these parallel worlds of the leisure society where everything is allowed, especially the craziest ideas, which have fed the imagination of designers to the point of imposing themselves as the new urban and social norms.

Faced with those dreamlands, where the pastiche, the copy, the artificial becomes reality, compared with delusional cities like Las Vegas or Dubai where the borders with reality have ended up completely blurred, our aesthetic of the city has changed considerably. An exhibition that also allows to bring to the fore the greatest international artists, all disciplines included (Martin Parr, Archigram, Pierre Huyghe, Lui Wei, Gaetano Pesce, Mircea Cantor, etc.)

I learned about this exhibition through Guillaume Fourmont, a journalist from Público, who contacted me (via Domenico ) for the report We all live in a theme park . In the conversation, topics that we have already been dealing with in this blog came up, especially, the forms that different settlements and environments take that appear to resemble a city and hide behind forms of organization that move away, for different reasons, from the traditional characteristics of a city. city: history, conflict, diversity, shared public space, etc. From Las Vegas to Dubai through Seaside, Celebration or many other examples.

P.S. The FR-ES translation (I suppose by some automatic system) of the official presentation, above in italics, is priceless. Impossible to find more errors, priceless to read Rem Colas 🙂

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Photo taken from http://livingviajes.com.