The silhouette of a city shines in the distance. A large modern city. I approach from a landing perspective. Is it Hong Kong, New York or Sidney, or a city that is still completely unknown to me?

Dense buildings on planned squares, skyscrapers, arenas and stadiums, industrial chimneys, office complexes, magazines, residential bunkers. So compact that, seen from here, there is still no view of any spaces, streets or people in between.

Now I’m so close that I can read the lettering on the ‘buildings’.

Atlantis 100, power box, Bellevue, twin-tower can be read Enterprise, Uranus, but also sky hawk, devils cake, dragon fire and calibre 240y. The names could refer to the functions of the buildings, but are more reminiscent of a science fiction city boasting a potent, imaginatively named armoury.
A warlike, hostile city ?

‘There is no place in the world that is not characterised by semiotic references’ wrote the philosopher Roland Barthes in his book “Myths of Everyday Life”.

If you walk through the city with this world view, every material becomes a carrier of signs.

For years, I have been working with the signs of my environment, the ‘patterning’ of the psychic inner life, as well as with the investigation of causal-associated seeing and thinking.

For two years in a row, I have collected the burnt remains of New Year’s Eve in deserted streets and squares at 8.00 a.m. on 1 January.

At first it was a ‘stadium’ that I came across at the side of the road. Lit, for a minute in luminous action, burnt out, burnt down.

Arranged into what I have stored in my memory as an image of a modern cosmopolitan city, this city has ‘grown’ on the surface of a low table.

The remnants of a night of fireworks, the energy that went into them, the rockets that soared, the cascades of light in the night sky, the dozens of fire brigade deployments – all this is gone. Apart from the headache, this is what remains after the big year-end bang: masses of charred architectural shapes pressed out of paper, smelling of black powder and sulphur – Bum Bum City