The following is a digital exhibition of the thesis work of
Hanneke van Deursen
Syracuse University School of Architecture
2020
This page serves as your introductory pamphlet,
offering a way into the project and
a guide to the exhibition
This is an exhibition about the city, or at least about something that simulates the city.
It stems from a fascination with the built environment—its ability to shape our very perception of our world.
It stems from a conviction that the city is something to be decrypted.
Something which can be unmasked.
This exhibition analyzes Neoliberalism, and architecture as its active agent: not only constructing space, but constructing subjectivity within that space.
Before you come in,
there are 3 things you should know.
First, let's talk about the title, it's a lot. Hover over to unpack it.
Second, there are three places you should know.
Shiny, tightly-controlled and inexplicably sterile, these sites begin to unravel the Truth Games at work in the city
Hover over to see more.
Deploying the View to Naturalize:
The Depoliticized Individual
Kop van Zuid
Rotterdam, Netherlands
Public / Private initiative to raise housing values in Rotterdam
Canary Wharf
London, England
Privately-owned office development built as London's new financial center
Deploying the Simulacrum to Naturalize:
The Uncritical Laborer
Deploying the Experience to Naturalize:
The Entertained Consumer
Privately-owned neighborhood developed as an elite NYC lifestyle experience
Hudson Yards
New York, USA
These places are not cities,
though they are city-like
I call them:
as they take on a utopian imaginary of the
ideal city according to the market
Capital Imaginaries are islands in
the city made possible by Neoliberal policy:
tax breaks, visa incentives, special enterprise zones
It is within these islands of raw and exaggerated capital that Truth Games, typically obscured,
float at the surface and begin to expose themselves.
The exhibition interrogates these spaces in order to uncover their Truth Games and
re-represent the city without its veil.
And this brings us to the final thing.
This is a project of representation
using Capital Imaginaries to uncover in the seemingly banal and everyday
the Truth Games which sneak their way
into Mental Conceptions about ourselves
our relations to others
and the space in which we exist
It is an experiment through modes of reading the city
which involves
repetition
revision
unmasking
delamination
defamiliarization
All in an effort to see again
what is right in front of us.
