Tilmann Meyer-Faje
Urban Dreams
URBAN DREAMS, group exhibition, Art Today Association/Center for Contemporary Art - Plovdiv (Bulgaria)
Huge advertising boards are an omnipresent phenomenon in the streets and on the rooftops of houses in Plovdiv. The happy messages of consumerism merge with modernist architecture, which had its glory days several decades ago. I placed billboards on the roadside of a modernist boulevard that take up characteristic elements of the surrounding architecture from around the 60ies. It was loaded with a highly ideological agenda pursued by the socialist state, which aimed to educate and transform Bulgarians “from rural poor people to modern city dwellers”. With the fall of the socialist regime a total rejection of the aesthetics of that period had taken place, while the obvious signs of the socialist-modernist time remain a dominant feature of the urban environment up until today. I doubt that it is possible to completely erase parts of history, and that is, why I want to question in which ways we can make this architecture still function in the present. Why do cities in Europe restrict their heritage preservation to the "real old" history? The qualities and the good parts of modern architecture from the recent past are often ignored. The great common roof terraces on the housing blocks in Plovdiv, where we find only advertising boards at the moment, are one example. Is common space still an option for urban planning? Emblematically, my billboards were facing towards a wall that was covered with a huge poster advertising campaign for Western style private residential front doors, with which the residents of the blocks typically try to give an individual touch to their apartments.
Urban Dreams
URBAN DREAMS, group exhibition, Art Today Association/Center for Contemporary Art - Plovdiv (Bulgaria)
Huge advertising boards are an omnipresent phenomenon in the streets and on the rooftops of houses in Plovdiv. The happy messages of consumerism merge with modernist architecture, which had its glory days several decades ago. I placed billboards on the roadside of a modernist boulevard that take up characteristic elements of the surrounding architecture from around the 60ies. It was loaded with a highly ideological agenda pursued by the socialist state, which aimed to educate and transform Bulgarians “from rural poor people to modern city dwellers”. With the fall of the socialist regime a total rejection of the aesthetics of that period had taken place, while the obvious signs of the socialist-modernist time remain a dominant feature of the urban environment up until today. I doubt that it is possible to completely erase parts of history, and that is, why I want to question in which ways we can make this architecture still function in the present. Why do cities in Europe restrict their heritage preservation to the "real old" history? The qualities and the good parts of modern architecture from the recent past are often ignored. The great common roof terraces on the housing blocks in Plovdiv, where we find only advertising boards at the moment, are one example. Is common space still an option for urban planning? Emblematically, my billboards were facing towards a wall that was covered with a huge poster advertising campaign for Western style private residential front doors, with which the residents of the blocks typically try to give an individual touch to their apartments.