Elian Somers – One and Another State of Yellow

Elian Somers – One and Another State of Yellow

24×33,5 cm / 40 pages (Hardcover + leporello + poster + booklet + card + c-print) / colour + 2 PMS / isbn 978-94-90119-50-8 / texts by Elian Somers, Francien van Westrenen / Design Hans Gremmen / edition of 300 signed and numbered copies / Price is excl. shipping / Also available as package with ‘Border Theories’: 50 euro, order here

The work ‘One and Another State of Yellow’ (2013–2017) by Elian Somers studies the interplay between urban planning, ideologies and psychological warfare around two landscapes of ‘war’ in the United States of America: El Paso on the United States-Mexico border and Washington DC, its capital city. El Paso is an American double city with Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In 2010 Juárez was listed as the deadliest city in the world. At the same time El Paso was listed as the safest city of the United States. Washington DC can be seen as the US overall war and control apparatus. ‘One and Another State of Yellow’ questions urban landscapes of deception, and more hypothetically, ways in which architecture and urban planning can be strategically employed – as psychological warfare strategies, i.e. propaganda, military deception, perception management – to construct threat, or stimulate fear, or even to deceive an audience or enemy. ‘One and Another State of Yellow’ joins together the photographic work ‘El Paso’ and the cartographic work ‘Washington DC’. The carto-graphic work is accompanied by the text work ‘From the Monument’. The photographic work shows the foothills of Mount Cristo Rey located within the El Paso-Juárez border zone, and reflects on its so-called threat narratives. The cartographic work inves-tigates the hilly landscape of Greater Washington DC. Both the landscapes of El Paso and Washington DC are in the grasp of all kind of plans, systems and thought experiments which give various perspectives on reality – both from the field of architecture and urban planning, as from the field of strategic planning.

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