Babak Fakhamzadeh
Latest posts
The Museum of Misplaced Monuments
The Bureau of Banalities is an intervention in the civic art of noticing. It collects voices and places that will not make the guidebook: the pause between errands, the view from a bus stop, a corner that carries a private history. The Bureau collects material for the Museum of Misplaced Monuments. In a landscape shaped for consumption, the
I am not lost at all
The Myth of the “Good Coloniser”
I had the pleasure to present at this year s Livingmaps Conference, on the theme of Shared Earth, Unequal Burdens: Living Maps for Environmental Justice. The project I recently completed, Sins Beneath the Equator, seemed a reasonable fit. Until one realises that colonial extraction was perhaps, first of all, a project that caused environmental and spatial
Cool Vienna
Never going to get to (the south of) France
In the run up to the fall of the Soviet Union, the West was imploding. Economies were in a rut, and one perceived escape latch was the privatisation of public infrastructure. Easy money in the short run, at the cost of selling a liveable future. We are now reaping the fruits of that nearsightedness, with
Cagliari in layers
TrueSpace
Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, has been tickling my imagination for decades. In the mid-1990s, software for ray tracing, a kind of 3D animation, was released under the name Cagliari TrueSpace. Shortly after, when I uncovered that the name of the company, Cagliari, was not a coincidental and random collection of letters, but the capital
Even the stories used to be better
The experience and act of traveling has changed. I occasionally comment on this, here and elsewhere, sometimes leaning towards favouring how many things have changed for the better, more often leaning towards the opposite end; destinations have become more and more unified, standardised, while everyone longs for a unique experience. We all suffer from overtourism.
The Chinese have come
Back in 2022, I managed to fly from Europe to Brazil with a stopover in Luanda. Angola, of course, another former Portuguese colony, and now also an exporter of oil, has a decent enough national airline, TAAG, which, in part because of the cheaper petrol at their disposal, is able to compete with European and