The city as we know it is disappearing. It’s not the streets and buildings that are dissolving, not the public spaces nor the government and bureaucracy – but the mechanisms and agreements that are affecting the people living in it. Most clearly, this can be seen in the current abandonment of public welfare as well as social and cultural infrastructures. The perpetual disappearance is disguised more or less thoroughly by images, marketing and so-called competition.
These simulations of «vapor space» (a virtual space consisting entirely of projections) portray the city as prosperous and lively while wrapping the seemingly dull urban everyday life in a colourful steam cloud of promise. The image becomes real in the sense that everything happening in the city refers to it. In the course of this re-coding process, we get so absorbed with self-improvement that we partake more in and notice less the shifting of reference points.
Bremen’s «Faulenquartier», presently being transformed into a wishful projection of a media centre, is a symptomatic non-place of vapor space. It is central and peripheral, projection screen and living space, construction site and ruin all together. the position between Bremen’s inner city and a fictional «Überseestadt» is reason enough for hyperactivity in city development.
The non-space character allows for an overflow of ideas and concepts. Everything is possible where nothing seems to be prescribed.
«Tales from Hazyland» occupy the gap between city and projection, tell about this process of «de-realisation» and open a perspective on the spaces of antagonistic activities and conflicts. In fixed (empty) locations and temporary (busy) surroundings, one can go in search of the social, mediatic and cultural occupancy of a city in disappearence.