DubaiLand by Aleix Plademunt (July 19, 2010) 
(50 votes, average: 3.22 out of 5)
Loading ...
Categories / Cityscapes / Constructed Landscape / / Click here to open comments section, click again when done to close / Comments Off
Introduction by Marta Daho
Aleix Plademunt’s approach to landscape is rooted in his reading of the signs and symbols he encounters. His reading is careful and detailed and centres on the action of man and its relationship to landscape. In that sense, Dubai appears as a very symptomatic place that is quite transparent about the social and ideological characteristics that have determined the artificial construction of its landscapes. Since such processes are happening all throughout the world, increasingly melting the idiosyncrasy of previously different cities in one single mode, the core reflection in Dubailand, as in many other projects by Plademunt, does not deal so much with topos, about the place, as much as about its process of dissolution. And thus, it is about the difficulty to keep reading and talking this universal language that Plademunt considers as the mother tongue that constitutes landscape or what he describes as our first way of communication before the first signs and symbols. Maybe his projects also talk about the need to finally assume what the symptomatic landscape of Dubai has to say about us.
Next / Between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, USA / Previous / A Place Where You Can’t Say No /
Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
My work reflects on different social attitudes, analyzed through the landscape.
There exists a direct relationship between man and nature. Nature speaks about us: about our attitudes, desires and concerns. We project ourselves onto nature. Nature is communicative and as a result of a culture’s relationship with it, we are able to analyze that culture, that society.
I am interested in the landscape when it has a direct relationship with the social, with us. I’m interested in analyzing the landscape from a present perspective, from the moment of history in which I am living. I’m questioning why I have found the landscape in this way, how we use it, how we move about in it, and what we understand by the term ‘landscape’. I like to communicate with the landscape and challenge it.
Dubai has had the privilege of being able to create a city from scratch, from nothing. The city has the space and money to enable it to realize the dreams of a society. The city speaks of the desires, hopes and habits of today’s society. A city was built by appropriating Western symbols and taking them to the extreme, to the limit. The result is a thematic and fictionalized city which in many cases borders on the absurd.
Although I took all pictures in Dubai, the reflection I extract from them is no longer local and becomes universal.
I understand Dubai as a generational and global reflection. It perform all our concerns, and the boundaries between Dubai, United States, Barcelona, Disney World and Egypt become more and more diffuse.
Aleix Plademunt (1980) lives and works in Vancouver B.C..
Click weblink aleixplademunt.com or browse our archives
Out now! 50pm new issue
Sports Issue Magazine App
Posted in category 82
