The Orchards

How can you conduct an exercise in psychogeography in the very absence of the space itself? In THE ORCHARDS, two individuals recall the existence of a place wiped off the face of the earth—the eponymous neighborhood in Damascus, destroyed in 2011 as punishment for its protests and uprisings against the Bashar al-Assad regime. Antoine Chapon alternates between warm, natural memories of an area famous for its orchards, and pixelated testimonies from the time of its destruction, balancing them against computer-rendered images of the “grand” building project designed not only to replace the old neighborhood, but to erase all traces of what came before. For this cityscape of the future, planning does not mean rebuilding, but sanitizing and normalizing. If in the early days of skyscraper construction they were the symbol of a new world, within the architecture of the present the glassy facades of skyscrapers are but a hall of mirrors deflecting from massacres, exploitation, and abusive regimes. Yet Chapon wonders, could technology not also rebuild other kinds of worlds? What if political graffiti and other elements of the real world purposely excluded from architectural plans could find their way into these sterile mock-ups? (Dora Leu)