This series of three images is taken from an ongoing work in different countries, that are either growing fast, shrinking, in transition or becoming derelict. The work is called Utopian Debris and it tries to depict the world in relation to ideas, visions and illustrations of the future of urbanism and landscape.
The first photo depicts a landscape at the edge of the inner city in Xiamen, (China) where a new cruise-ship harbour is being built, or rather, dug.
The workers, often referred to as “the floating population”, come from rural areas, and live either on the construction site in light and transportable structures, or in one of the remaining farming villages inside the city, that have been literally extruded upward in order to accommodate the constant flow of the “floating population”.
The site and photograph stand in relation to the early landscape/urban photography showing the urbanisation of the American West, now approximately 100 years ago. And in particular it refers to a photo taken by Asahel Curtis in 1910: The levelling of the hills to make Seattle.
The second photograph of the section of a construction site which is excavating the ground under an existing village, and the third, the sand-storage area for the construction of the Olympic Park in Beijing, show how the artificial nature of places is temporarily disguising itself as the natural.
Landscape is cynically shown like a mere space used for the development of our society.