Instant City

INSTANT CITY – a yesterday’s future, Video 16:9, 13:39 min, 2019

The Future of Yesterday – The film Instant City is inspired by a utopia of the same title by the architectural group “Archigram” (Peter Cook, Ron Herron). Airships bring the “Big City Vibe” to small towns through simple pop-up architecture, lowered by balloons. A temporary metropolis is created – instant. The Japanese Metabolism movement (Kiyonori Kikutake, Kenzō Tange) envisioned in the 1960s an architecture that functions like an organism – replacing and renewing itself, spreading or multiplying. It operates as a flexible mega-structure made of building modules.

The views and ideas of Archigram and the Metabolists served as the basis for my own vision of a modern Instant City. In this vision, the airships continuously bring building modules out of nowhere into the desert. Over the course of a single night, a megacity emerges, expanding infinitely. At its peak, collapse occurs, and the city sinks back into the desert from which it emerged. Atlantis needed only a day and a night to sink, but my Instant City, in contrast, is born and disappears, requiring only one single night.