Svea Josephy, The Park, 2025.

Cities of the Future - In the Past

by Svea Josephy

Long Gallery: 02.10.25 - 13.11.25

Metropolis of Tomorrow: Cities of the future in the past explores the relationship between photography and the spatial-planning disciplines.  The exhibition uses the languages of architecture and photography to critically explore the South African urban landscape and how it is constructed. It focusses on South African cities as a way of thinking through the inheritances of the past, present and future. It imagines other futures for alternative pasts. What will cities of the future look like when they have been erased or subsumed by other structures, social upheavals or environmental catastrophe? What will the cities of the future look like when laminated the modern heritage of the present? What if South African cities had not been built around principles of apartheid and colonial planning? In using the plan, the model and the photograph, several photographic and design languages are used, including the ambrotype, the cyanotype, the architectural model, the photograph of the model and the computer-generated image, in the form of Ai generated photographs. Some of these expressions use a camera and others are camera-less forms of photography. The plan and the model are always in the future, the photograph often in the past, and Ai, like the plan and the model are part of the imaginary, rather than the lived reality of space and place. This exhibition engages with speculative photography as a way to consider the structure of South African cities.