Mapping The Zone: Reflections on Global Capital is a photographic investigation of architectural configurations at Canary Wharf. The project operates as a cognitive map of the urban landscape of Canary Wharf, it consists of a series of large format photographs taken from rooftops, reception areas and at street level. These fragments become an exploration of the buildings’ surface and simultaneously a reflection of the city itself.
The project explores 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.
Canary Wharf is one of the main economic centres in the world. Between the 1980s and 1990s, a massive urban redevelopment took place, including the erection of One Canada Square, one of the most iconic buildings in London. Currently Canary Wharf possesses three of the tallest skyscrapers in the UK and houses headquarters of banks and multinational corporations, with a working population of 93,000 people a day.
This project has been developed with the kind support of the Canary Wharf Group.
Ignacio Acosta
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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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These images are so seductive, so formally appealing, that they lead us into a dangerously fetishistic appreciation of the architecture of capital. This is an erotic mapping of the zone, of the material manifestations of neoliberal ideology, however, there is a spook in the cupboard, a spectre haunting. The absolute absence of the human stain renders these buildings ruins, we might be looking at them from a post-future after the terminal decline of hyper-capitalism, the dead rendering of Fukiyama’s dream, no more alive than the Modernist hulks, the Enlightenment culture rendered in concrete and steel that they surpassed and stood in mockery of. Here is an elegy to what we might call the ‘capitalist sublime’.
In Acosta’s massively considered aesthetic there is a sense of the divine, we see more than the frail human eye can aspire to. We are given privileged access to another reality, again, we move as ghosts. And that is the ultimate root of the critique embedded in these images, we are turned into ghosts by the architecture of power, we are expunged, fractured and atomised. These buildings are fashioned from huge multi-replicated industrial elements slotted together, the human again made redundant in the production process, at every point the human is negated. We are made alien in the world we created. By focussing on aspects of repetition, Acosta invites us to consider the material nature of this architecture, the relation of material to theory.
John Millar
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Ignacio Acosta uses the essential character of photography to explore the essential nature of the architecture and urban spaces of Canary Wharf.
The buildings have quite specific and in architectural terms quite limited formal and physical characteristics. They are based on repetition of certain shapes and factory-made building components. Many of them are reflective -such as glass, and polished metal or stone. Photography is well placed to convey these characteristics: it can capture the tactile and reflexive qualities of surface; it can isolate a part of a surface or represent a whole surface in its context; and partly because of the previous point, but also because of its reproducibility, it can address the phenomenon of repetition.
Jeremy Melvin
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Ignacio Acosta’s project Mapping the Zone: Reflections on Global Capital offers unprecedented insight into Canary Wharf’s corporate spaces. Over the course of one year, Acosta used a large format camera to thoroughly document the district. He focussed his lens on lobbies and entrance spaces, detailed reflections and exterior surfaces – creating what could be read as an autopsy of the site. By providing a view into the spatial dimension of global capital, Acosta has created the potential for us to begin to unearth the theories that inform the construction and maintenance of these significantly understudied but increasingly common, regular and repeated places.
Trenton Oldfield & Deepa Naik