Most of the world’s population, outside historical centers, now lives in ubiquitous spaces: you wouldn’t know whether you are in the urban sprawl of Northern Italy, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, or in parts of Poland or Southeast Asia, if not for the signage. I’m interested in those landscapes, and I mention Northern Italy not by chance, but because I grew up in those landscapes myself. I was always puzzled by how the narration of Italian identity was so different from what I perceived around me as a child, and those landscapes deeply influenced my artistic creation. The political narration of the area was also very different from what one actually lived in daily life. This discrepancy between narration, perception, and reality made me want to investigate further what we have become and make sense of it, rather than relying on a mirroring of the past.

You wouldn’t know whether your Instagram-friendly square villa is in Bali, Portugal, Malibu, or Antigua. Residential and resort lifestyles are ubiquitous too: you could be in Egypt’s North Coast, the Maldives, Dubai, Punta Cana, Cartagena de Indias, or Batumi, noticing only slight differences in what has been built over the last 30–40 years. This is what I called “The Idealized City” — mostly designed by transnational hedge funds, algorithms, and software, rather than by bold, enlightened, political decisions — and very far from the “Ideal City” theorized by Leon Battista Alberti. Artificial intelligence is only accelerating these processes, with digital and physical landscapes merging in ways that challenge the perception of reality.

What’s interesting to me is that while every political ideology of the past, and every empire in history, had its own architecture, it seems that nobody wants to claim contemporary architecture as its own, not even the neoliberal class that enforced it through treaties, diplomacy, soft power, and societal control. This may be the trick, the deception of our time: to present reality as a given fact, as the only viable solution, as the only normal evolution of things. In fact, we live in an era of abundance that would allow us to sit and think things through, and to evaluate other realities. This conflict is not only an economic one; it is a war on perception. It is no longer important what is real or not, or rather what is true. In the omnipresent neoliberal ideology, truth no longer matters. It is not a matter of relativism either; it is the most profound form of demolition of meaning.