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Under Construction

The performative video essay entitled Under Construction is a work loosely related to the author's diploma project It´s Buildable (2020). The thesis focused on the controversial new building at Masaryk Station in Prague and formally explored the possibilities of the then relatively new technology of deep fake video. In the current video essay, the author lets the architect of the entire project, Zaha Hadid (1950-2016), speak in her own fictional voice created with the help of artificial intelligence.

Through a specilative monologue, the architect reveals the complex mechanism of her repressed emotions. Doubts about her own work are mixed here with an eclectic defence of her career. An insight into the inner self of the now deceased "starchitect" takes place inside her nearly completed building, which seems to have become a labyrinth of her own making. She tries in vain to find her way out of it, and at the same time cannot detach herself from it. This internal emotional contradiction correlates with the issue of urban development and the privatisation of public space for the purpose of maximising profit, at the cost of negative impacts on the environment and the quality of life of the public.

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