Center, Ring, Mall

Experimental short. 17 min, 2023.
Distribution enquiries: info@li-ma.nl.

A multi-vocal triptych through peripheral sites of urban infrastructure: a data center, a ring road, and a run-down mall. All three sites were built with certain worldviews: visions of the future and US-influenced promises of progress that didn't turn out to be the utopias they presented themselves as. Through multi-lingual texts, a site-specific soundtrack, 16mm and 3D images, the spaces and their implications are subjectively mapped, poeticized and questioned. A poetic materialism of decay, renewal, remembering and projecting, Center, Ring, Mall is perhaps a mourning, but one that desires and demands a rebirth.

Director's Statement

It kept raining every day that summer, but the fall would be beautiful. "Center, Ring, Mall" is a collaborative attempt to cinematically capture and address three infrastructural sites around Amsterdam. The first is a large data center, home to countless Big Tech servers and located in the "Science Park" area: a key site in the history of the internet and node for global traffic. The second: the ring road highway surrounding the city, built in the second half of the 20th century and a monument to the citizen-as-car-owner and the city divided into interior and periphery. The third is a worn-down mall at the edge of town that's fallen out of fashion: a ruin of last century's capitalist and consumerist optimism.

Rather than aiming to produce intellectual knowledge or research, I was more interested in playing with ways of sensing and feeling these places. Across the different voices, textures, and mediums, I wanted to keep a concern with urban materiality and its affects at the core. None of these places is exclusively good or bad – but they're most definitely not neutral. In the end, I see this project as a way to collectively reclaim agency over these vast, inhuman sites and systems.

Installation view