Mons, Belgium
2009 - 2010 For the series Commonness I've portrayed the cities Bordeaux, Kosice, Mechelen, Plzen and Mons all European cities that aspire to the title of European Capital of Culture. The resulting pictures display a similarity between the different cities, a discovery both surprising and unsettling since the cities compete for the title with distinctive assets. And yet, here they are shown to be overwhelmingly homogenous.

City Visions Europe was a design-research program focusing on the urban condition of four mid-scale European cities. It offers the framework for exchange between architects and cities to develop, present, and debate speculative architectural ideas on the future of these cities as well as the European city in general.

I was commissioned by the Berlage Institute to photograph each of the subject-cities of City Visions Europe. A first exhibition, located in the pedestrian tunnel that passes underneath the roundabout in front of Mechelen’s railway station, presented the first two series of photographs, portraying Mechelen and Mons. The photographs provide a coherent, and simultaneously tactile and abstracted, reading of the contemporary urban condition of this two mid-scale Belgian cities.

www.cityvisionseurope.eu

www.berlage-institute.nl

www.vai.be

www.ccea.cz