Lukas van Bentum, Spectacle

Across the former USSR, one of the strongest visual indexes of all that has been wrought over the past thirty years has come in the dramatic transformation of urban landscapes.

Spectacle aims to examine these processes by taking the example of Azerbaijan and Georgia. Azerbaijan which has experienced in the last two decades a remaking of its capital Baku, through demolishing entire neighborhoods to make way for gigantic new building projects. And the urban development of Georgia especially initiated by the ambitious development programs of former president Mikheil Saakashvili which were halted in 2012 when his party lost the election.

Spectacle is a chronicle of the built and unbuilt. The actual and the visual. The process in which the space between images and realities is reconfigured. Furthermore, it argues that buildings and monuments should be seen as forms of political action and examines how architecture is being used in order to shape subjectivities, identities, and cognitions. It aims to explore the power of architecture – and the architecture of power.