Mapping The Zone: Reflections on Global Capital
Mapping The Zone: Reflections on Global Capital is a photographic investigation of architectural configurations at Canary Wharf. These photographs explore the formal aesthetic problematic raised by the complicity between photographic representation and architectural formalism. The images can be seen as typologies of the expression of an ideology as it is embedded in the modern institution. Focusing upon subtle disruptions of the formalism of the architecture, the work reflects upon the function of images within regimes of global representation.
Canary Wharf is one of the main economic centres in the world. Between the 1980’s and the 1990’s a massive urban redevelopment of the area took place, which included the erection of One Canada Square, one of the most iconic buildings in London. Currently Canary Wharf possesses three of the tallest skyscrapers of the UK and houses headquarters of banks and multinational corporations with global influence, the working population being approximately 93,000 a day.
Mapping the Zone: Reflections on Global Capital presents Canary Wharf in series of architectural typologies of aerial views, corners, glass facades and unoccupied reception areas. These fragments become an exploration of the buildings’ surface and at the same time a reflection on the city itself. By presenting fragments I intend the images to effectively operate as a cognitive map of the urban landscape of Canary Wharf to enable viewers to recognise the former appearance of this utopian world of order, while experiencing the aesthetic pleasure of seeing.
This project has been developed with the kind support of the Canary Wharf Group.
Ignacio Acosta. 2009
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Ignacio Acosta’s spectacular and gleaming photographs of the office spaces of Canary Wharf: flattened walls of shimmering windows through which we catch elusive glimpses of the modern men within, operate as ironic homages to an aesthetic of power from which humanity has been almost entirely expunged. An empty reception area, light bouncing off its bright, white, reflective surfaces, exudes an unoccupied excess of glamour and wealth that is both fascinating and obscene. We know that this space will never be used, that its absent inhabitants are entirely imaginary, projections of an institutional fantasy that the city has about itself. Yet it is the meticulous objectivity of the photographic image, its adhesion to the literal surfaces of the buildings, their walls, their shining floors, that reminds us of the absolute materiality of that fantasy.
Joanna Lowry, Between the Hallucinatory and the Real exhibition catalogue, 2009
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Mapping The Zone: Reflections on Global Capital has been commissioned by the Canary Wharf Group to be exhibited in the reception of One Canada Square during the London Festival of Architecture in June 2010.