SYLVIA MATAS
There Was a City

2021
3min 3sec
single-channel video, silent

"There Was a City" was created from satellite photographs taken from Google Earth. I looked for images that felt ambiguous- sites where it seemed uncertain if what I was looking at was in a state of construction or decline. After spending so much time inside in the past year and I was thinking about the temporary nature of human built environments, relative to non-human timescales. The subtitles describe an amorphous group of people and how they occupy these built spaces that are transforming in time.