Bahar Noorizadeh

Bahar Noorizadeh is filmmaker, writer, and platform designer. Her work has appeared in the Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, DIS Art platform, Transmediale Festival, Berlinale Forum Expanded, and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images among others. Upcoming engagements include participation at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial 2020. Noorizadeh’s current research examines Contemporary Art, finance and emerging technology via their shared speculative procedures, building on the notion of “Weird Economies” to precipitate a cross-disciplinary approach to economic futurism and post-financialization imaginaries. She is pursuing this as a PhD candidate in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she holds a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. For her Studio Dialogue Noorizadeh has shared some of her research from her Disurbanism project.

To dispute the validity of the neoliberal narrative, one should look no further than the space itself: city design, urban policy, and their derivative chronopolitics. As part of the artist’s long-term research program on the archeology of networks, Disurbanism revisits proposals for a communist sprawl in the 1929 Soviet Union. Originally developed by Mikhail Okhitovich and Moisei Ginzburg, urban planners and members of the Constructivist architecture group OSA around 1929-1930, Disurbanism set to eliminate the difference between the city and the countryside and propose a radical critique of urbanization itself. For Disurbanists, the sickness of the modern city and its inevitable centralized hegemony could only be resolved by its destruction and dissemination across the Soviet land. In its place, they envisioned an energy and communication grid: a network of highways, infrastructure, mobile homes, natural resources, and public services across the countryside. Disurbanism would counter modernists’ (i.e. Corbusier’s) attempts at resolving the internal contradictions of the urban setting—a capitalist fatality—by bringing the rural (gardens and greens) into the confines of the city.  The research features an ardent exchange between Le Corbusier, who was chairing the Moscow Green City competition at the year of Disurbanists’ submission, and Moisei Ginzburg.

Below are a series of 3D models designed from Disurbanist archives and architectural sketches, by Maria Bessarabova