Aleix Plademunt Perez: My work reflects on different social attitudes, analyzed through the landscape. 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’. 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.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 19, 2010

“My son, there will be a post petrodollar economy in Arabia and it will be up to you create it.” That is what Sheikh Maktoum’s father said in 1990, shortly before his death, says Swiss photographer Florian Joye. “I chose the United Arab Emirates to work on, and especially Dubai, for a variety of reasons. After googling Dubai on the net, my curiosity and interest were drawn to the confusing mass of Dubai images that can be found there. The vast juxtaposition of virtual images, scale models and augmented reality of which there were many more than real pictures of Dubai is confusing. The idea of the city preceded its reality. My fascination for this new city caught between utopia and excessiveness, pride and seduction is the palpable reality of the purpose o f Sheikh Maktoum.”

Selected by Nathalie Herschdorfer on June 9, 2010

The title of this project deals with the idea of subsistence in a renounced space and prevalence of identity within unwanted houses or structures in the United Arab Emirates (specifically Dubai, Sharjah and Ajman). The photographs of these spaces are varied from being semi-abandoned (people moving to new houses), to those soon to be demolished in lieu of a bigger and more innovative edifice. These interiors represent a young culture that came to notice after the oil boom nearly thirty years ago. With the current need for modernism and the building of the ‘future,’ cultural extinction is sadly inevitable and a new identity is thus forming.

Selected by Elie Domit on February 7, 2010