Framing Location II

Framing Location II is a video project within Urban Excercises, a series of works dealing with the problematic of urbanism, architecture, social space and subjectivity. Framing Location II combines and recontextualizes photographs of cityscapes taken from elevated viewing points like skyscrapers, jets or helicopters with architectural frames from airports and other transit and viewing areas. A disjuncture is set up between the architectual framing of what Marc Auge has called non-places and the exposed and sprawling cityscapes; through a generic waiting lounge of the Paris airport, Mexico City materialises, which then morphs into New York City, then the foreground shifts to a Viennese stairway with San Francisco spread in the background. These sutured combinations create universal cities flattened into a modernist grid while simultaneously showing how this imaginary city is created by architectual frames and the scopic regimes of urbanist photograpy. The moment and position of viewing is instrumental in these cityscapes. Fluctuating between the generic city and a specific viewing point, Framing Location II uses an urban gaze to contruct a global-urban nexus.
(Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber)