Bahar Noorizadeh

The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism

2021

Urban structures that constantly envelope the majority of the Earth’s human population should be rethought while we engage with the question of immersion. The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism, a video installation by Bahar Noorizadeh, revisits the avant-garde architectural movement of Disurbanism, born in the 1920s in the Soviet Union. Disurbanists aim at dismantling the centralised and hegemonic structures of a modern city while blurring the boundaries between the city and the countryside. The context of immersion calls upon such an urbanist imagination as a metaphor for non-hierarchical aspirations in building new, preferably collective networks. Similarly to cities, the internet is based on a networked structure as well. Contemporary developments of the internet point toward a new non-hierarchical and decentralised web, that would replace the currently known web2 with web3.

Both types of networks have already been the subject of the artist’s investigative work. Noorizadeh in her research engages with the histories of economics, cybernetic socialism and activist strategies against the financialisation of life and the living space, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like for the present.

The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism