Since 2018, more than half of the world’s population has been living in cities for the first time – by 2030, this figure is expected to rise to 60%. The most extreme example of ongoing urbanization is the Chinese city of Shenzhen, which grew from 30,000 to 12.5 million inhabitants within 30 years. Despite these extreme developments and the increasingly acute consequences for the environment and people, the urban environment is perceived as a natural part of modern human life by its inhabitants and in most cases questioned very little.

CONCRETE UNCERTAINTIES asks how we perceive urban living space and what its future will look like in the face of omnipresent resource scarcity, climatic and social changes. A walk-in installation by the artist Iyho in the green outdoor area of the studios invites visitors to question the human relationship between the urban and the natural world, as well as the development of our (urban) living situation.

At the same time, the duo Die Typografie Abstrakte live designs the interior of the studios, transforming it into a walk-in sculpture between raw abstraction and organic forms.

With Iyho and the artist duo Die Typografie Abstrakte, Culture.Room presents two artistic positions that take up and question the controversial construct of our modern and urban way of life from fundamentally different perspectives.

As an emerging artist in this critical period of time, one of his goals is to make his own generation reflect about the distorted nature that surrounds us. Often named as “post-nature” or in some other circumstances as “third landscape” by french landscape architect and writer Gilles Clément, this is the nature to which he was the most exposed as a millenial raised on the outskirts of several cities.

“There was a time when the societies in many places of the world took the comfortable and fixed reality they were living in for granted. Now, we are more and more facing the fact that it was an constructed illusion, an economic lie and a conformist behavior that originated from misinformation and human ignorance. The uncertainty is now a concept that floods every aspect of our lives and our society. It is the only concept we will be able to embrace in the long term, including the incredible amount of opportunities and dangers that will come with it."

“With this socio-political and ever-present background as well as the many imminent threats and challenges to human societies, Iyho decided to clarify and shape his thoughts and ideas into the  “The beauty of defeat: a manifesto for post-industrial ruins” in January 2020, one month before the first world wide lockdown. This architectural manifesto pretends to gather the attitudes that may allow us to deal with the depression caused by the needed social change.”

“The “Sentences of hope and anger”, which are disposed everywhere inside the installation, were specially conceived and designed for the exhibition and were born out of a dramatization of the crucial concepts of the manifesto.”

“The 6 artworks have the trees and nature in general as main subjects. They focus on a manipulated and distorted version of nature, offering another perspective of it. As a response to the fact that the environment is becoming more than ever a political tool in the complexity of the human systems, the photographs themselves are a physical materialization of the contrary concepts that the “millennial” generations had to deal with. Hope and anger, light and darkness, defeat and, above all of them, a strange yet very intense beauty.”