12 | mai | 2016 | NadjaVilenne

Aglaia Konrad
Copy Cities, 2003 – 2004
12 cahiers DIN A4, photocopies couleurs et NB, édition 7/7 sous custode.
#01 Urban creatures
#02 Desert Cities
#03 Dakar (survey #01)
#04 Les jumelles
#05 Elasticity Spread
#06 Suburbs
#07 Dakar Cuts
#08 Seoul (survey #02)
#09 Undecided Frames
#10 Some Cities
#11 Makowsky’s Bungalow Colony, High Falls, NY
#12 Hoover Over

In Copy Cities (2003- 04), Aglaia Konrad assembled a selection of her work on cities. The cahiers indicate and visualize the diversity of her engagement with the urban condition; they are exercises that seek to isolate architectural objects, from towers that search each other’s company in the urban landscape (Les .Jumelles, cahier #04) to strange, contingent moments of real-life urban collage (Urban Creatures, cahier #01). Dakar appears as both a survey of photographie zooms (Dakar (Survey #01 ), cahier #03) and a series of edited images in which pictorial elements are isolated by erasing the building’s context (Dakar Cuts, cahier #07). There is an elaborate monographie series on desolate, modern NewTown landscapes outside Cairo (Desert Cities, cahier #02) and one on American suburbia in pairs of close and distant views (Suburbs, cahier #06), presenting the suburbs simultaneously as architecture and urban landscape. Copy Cities, moreover, includes large areal views of Seoul (Seoul (Survey #02), cahier #09), portraits of quirky and at times miniaturized buildings (Urban Creatures, cahier #01), a mixed selection of images of hard-to-locate urban landscapes from Konrad’s 2002 book Elasticity (Elasticity Spread, cahier #05) and a range of double, « undecided » images of urban scenes, buildings, and interiors (Undecided Frames, cahier #09). Sorne Cities (cahier #10), howe,ver, takes an entirely different form and contains an alphabetically ordered list of a variety of city types and urban qualifications, starting with « a city, abandoned city, AB City » and ending with « zionist city » and « zoo city. » The status of the list is· anything but clear. lt reads like the ultimate index system to Konrad’s practice, but without the usual page numbers or cross-references that connect those terms to specific works, projects, or photographs. (Michiel Dehaene)