Atelier van Lieshout Slave City - Urban Plan

cm 232 x 560

Atelier Van Lieshout is a collective of Dutch artists founded in Rotterdam in 1995 by Joep van Lieshout (Ravenstein 1963), internationally known for its projects bordering on art, design, architecture and urban planning. More often the projects are ironic, nonfunctional and unworkable, revealing a deeply critical and provocative intention on the part of the artists against social conventions and the current capitalist system. Through biomorphic sculptures, unusual and surprising housing units, designs or models of complex machinery that borrow a radical architectural language typical of the 1960s and 70s, the collective reflects on the identity, role and contradictions of mankind in contemporary society. "Slave City – Urban Plan" represents the urban plan of an imaginary city, indicating all the main buildings and their functions. Slave City is a utopian or dystopian city, depending on your point of view, designed to the last detail, from the buildings to the social order, to be completely self-sufficient and environmentally sustainable. The city is capable of producing all necessary food, generating energy from renewable sources and recycling all waste, to the extent of using the bodies of its dead to create energy. To succeed, however, the two hundred thousand citizens of Slave City are deprived of personal freedom and all the rhythms and cycles of life are governed by authoritarian laws that strictly determine the hours of work, relaxation and rest. Slave City is an open project that can be continuously enhanced with new sculptures, models and drawings, designed by Atelier Van Lieshout with the intention of highlighting the contradictions of a society based on profit, in which sensitivity for the environment has become ideology and democratic principles have often become authoritarian instruments.

Yes

P. Ferri, “Atelier Van Lieshout”, Flash Art, 245, April-May, 2004, p. 144. J. Allen et al. (eds.), Atelier Van Lieshout, Rotterdam 2007. D. Eccher, C. Piccoli, M. Maccari (eds.), Atelier Van Lieshout, exhibition catalogue (Rome, MACRO-Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma), Rome 2007. Joep Van Lieshout. Slave City, exhibition catalogue (London, Albion Gallery), London 2008.

Foto Patrizia Tocci

Purchased from the artists

Work on Paper