The skylines of contemporary cities are littered with construction cranes. The building of luxury apartments and exclusive neighbourhoods has become a key driver of modern economies. At the basis of this process the demolished materials of the old city are reconstituted and eventually form the very foundations of the new one under construction. My work deals with these processes of urban redevelopment known as ‘creative destruction’.
Utilising digital photography as an imag(in)ing technology I attempt to open up discussions about this cannibalistic ecology by putting these material practices central to the act of image making. Drawing inspiration from the unmaking, rough stacking and loose reassembly encountered on demolition sites, I put images of their materiality through a series of related post-production processes, creating hybrid assemblages. Multiple time frames and material forms are composited into a single frame. The results are a type of anti-form imagery, reflecting qualities established in other fields such as painting and post-minimalist sculpture, to probe the abstracted logics at the heart of a real estate system.
