Excuse Us While We Improve Your View, Atlantis

Excuse Us While We Improve Your View, Atlantis is a video installation featuring an experimental film on the 2022 World Exposition in Dubai.

The film draws inspiration from Plato’s myth of the lost island empire of Atlantis, which sank undersea at the peak of its civilization and ideal state power. The installation translates Atlantis’ mythical imagery into the aesthetics of Dubai’s international free trade zones, luxury real estate, and World Exposition sightseeing, symbolizing new social orders and frontiers for state-of-the-art cosmopolitan urbanism. Through a blend of commercial spots and personal travel recordings capturing a journey through the metropolis until the Expo’s venue, the visual research documents the world representation mediated by Expo – a “worldling” – blurring the line between reality and fiction.

Atlantis becomes a legendary tourist destination, reflecting a Western tendency to romanticize and exoticize faraway lands, perpetuating an othering and voyeuristic gaze, allured by the realization of an unknown elsewhere. The narrative unfolds within a surveilled, enclosed, and transient fair, where political expression is marginalized. Passports transform into branded gadgets, serving as symbols of manufactured global contact, creating an illusion of an external reality with equal freedom of movement for all.

Immersive experiences, idealistic rhetoric on sustainability, and promises of “real-world” solutions simulate a worldly narrative, enchanting virtual visitors and passenger spectators alike. Whether envisioned as a utopian „island of the blessed,“ an oasis amidst the desert, or a distant land on the horizon of the sea, Atlantis remains a mirage, an elusive vision of progress woven with nationalist dreams, an incessant stream of virtual landscapes, whose ‘concrete’ realization continually seeks to be improved and perfected.