We’re working on a proposal for a new artwork for an exhibition titled The New Age of Babylon. Our piece is going to focus on how science fiction films often present viewers with visions and hypothesis for the future, Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil (1985) gives us a glimpse of a bureaucratic future in which people live in ‘Utopian People Housing’. This housing, situated in The Shangri La Towers, is directly connected to a power station churning out smoke.
The work itself comprises of fragments of the design process that would have gone in to making The Shangri La Towers in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil (1985). No longer needed, these items have been discarded and utilised for other, more menial, tasks: a book mark, folded paper stabling a chair, and maquette of The Shangri La Towers acting as a door stop for one of the entrances to the gallery.
An architectural sketch of the Towers will be folded and placed under the leg of an unstable chair in the corner of the gallery (near the main entrance), which the invigilator of the space is invited to use. The invigilator will also be given a bookmark they can use in their book if they are reading one (if they’re not reading, we will provide a book that can be placed near the invigilators chair). The bookmark will feature a design plan for the cloud pattern painted on the cooling towers of the utopian housing development. A small detailed maquette (30 x 20cm) of the Shangri La Towers will be placed by the entrance via CSM reception to act as a doorstop.
New Babylon is a design from the past for the future. Our proposal is begging the question of what happens to those plans, now that the future has become the present and those plans haven’t quite come to fruition. We see a parallel between this and films and literature set in the future. This is the beauty of Science Fiction; it has the ability to tell a story that relates to the current world, but which can be set in a future of limitless possibilities. Until you reach 2015 and realise self-drying clothes, flying cars and hover boards aren’t yet available (Back to the Future 2 predictions), there’s no one to tell you, you’re wrong.
In Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), we see a portrayal of how someone can at once be a victim of the society they inhabit and also complicit in helping that society function. The now dysfunctional metropolis depicted in the film was built with the intention of it being a paradise; the infamous tower block Shangri-La Towers is named after the utopia described in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. This, like Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon, is another idea where time has caught up and reduced its function to viral that of a brick or small piece of wood. Holding only value to those who desire to prop open a door.
