Age of Kitsch

2019 - 2022

Kitsch (n.)
“Art, decorative objects, or design considered by many people to be ugly, without style, or false but enjoyed by other people, often because they are funny.”
(Cambridge Dictionary)


Its use therefore necessarily involves a value judgment and the standard that conditions it. In any cases, whatever your taste, Kitsch leaves no one indifferent.
In the past, periods have seen the emergence of new styles, sometimes considered as eccentric or Kitsch, like Rococo. But what about Kitsch in contemporary architecture? How has the use of 'Kitsch design' evolved in the construction of modern urban spaces?

Kitsch is at the opposite of the Modern Movement, according to which 'form follows function': form moves away from the utilitarian dimension to become decorative, to transmit emotions. For some people, Kitsch is comfortable, it makes them happy and reenchants their daily lives. Nowadays, Kitsch is used to create imaginary worlds, calling for a journey inside the journey. The architecture is staged like a 'living museum', producing an exotic attraction where (mainly) tourists can escape from everyday reality by offering a new experience of a bygone past.
Used out of local context and time, Kitsch artificially inflates the comfort of decoration into a uniquely fake aesthetic statement. In the modern urban spaces, Kitsch is made up of elements put together, belonging to unrelated universes and periods, decontextualized from local history: Orientalism, Ancient Greece, Egypt of the Pharaohs, the Baroque period and various mythologies. Kitsch is inauthentic, in the material sense (fake wood, fake marble, fake gold...) but also in the figurative sense (stereotypes, déjà vu).
Overload, saturation, excess, grandiloquence, 'architectural show' are some of the words associated with Kitsch, which create a break with the vocabulary specific to architecture, in favor of that of the entertainment industry.

From Turkey to the United Arab Emirates via Cyprus, this photographic series documents the use of kitsch in modern urban space. Impressive hotels, shopping malls and leisure areas are used as real theme parks to make people dream, travel, all in one and only space mixing universes from all over the world. These architectural productions use colonnades, Greek polystyrene statues, fake and opulent gildings, copies of places or emblematic periods in the history of architecture... all mixed with modern materials and architecture, creating a hybrid and unique style.