The utopias that Walkowiak examines in his works
have been given an architectural form in, for example, the
planned city of Chandigarh, in northern India, built in the
1950s to plans by the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier.
At the time of its construction, this type of urban concept
- based on elementary geometric forms, characterized
by steel and concrete and guided by the principle of
functionality - was regarded as symbolic of India‘s striving
for modernity. In its succession of black-and-white,
unpeopled shots of Chandigarh, now showing signs of
deterioration, the 2017 The City Lost acts as an archive of
the city‘s architectural forms and formal compositions. This
visual archive is overlaid with an audio track that borrows
from the sound plane of science fiction films such as Blade
Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the audio plane
only seemingly lifts Chandigarh‘s architectural formations
into an uncertain future. Rather, the city is contrasted with
culturally-shaped future visions familiar from the genre of
the science fiction film.