At first you may feel unstable. Reverse urbanism here is literal in its perception: your feet hold onto the vastness of space, and your head almost touches the roof of the upside-down house. Hold on as you look down at the satellite dish.
An upward-looking shallow steel bowl with a tentacle in the middle restlessly sucks in information in different languages: movies, music, news, and colors fill the rooms of people in Vienna. Invisible spear connects to faraway places and manipulates everyday life. But what is being sucked in, if the house is reversed, if the satellite dish is still keeping its gravitational position but now sits just above the cruising altitude of upside-down reality?
Planes are held back from reaching their destinations, or perhaps caught heading to a destination of no return. They are stuck in an in-between space, a corridor of teleportation. The stasis is somehow impermanent, lasting only until hot tongues of sun from below, like a stove fire, melt the puddles of soap dripping onto the dishes from the sinks and bathtubs. The soap bars are almost too small to fulfill their function. The vastness of space is sucking in unfulfilled promise, the unsustained connection, the pieces of utopia infected with the feral dirt of everyday reality.
The exhibition Ghost Town centers on River Rapids, a video work which investigates not only the condition of Belgrade’s waterfront but also its direct connection to another new development taking place in Riga. Almost identical model flats in both cities offer room for teleportation.
Maybe, at last, green is safe at home and clasps those absorbed by it, protecting them from the distress and shifting grounds of everyday life, as if it were not the planet that is spinning but the patch of land holding houses, holding home.
Holding home, while another ghost town is being built in a rapidly densifying city that is not yet experiencing reverse urbanism. The public turns private, pushing an unorchestrated life away, and the social fabric homogenizes itself into one pattern, one color. Proceed with caution: uniform small boxes may accommodate only fake fruit slowly gathering dust in a shrieking, silent space for protecting wealth. Welcome to Ghost Town, a paralyzed, semi-reversed promise of teleportation to luxurious urban life with the white, crusty dog lurking somewhere.