Hyper-real utopia
America is neither a dream nor reality. It is a sort of hyper-reality. America is a utopia which has come true before.
From “America” by Jean Baudrillard
America is a modern experience in its entirety, genuine utopian realization of a series of interrupted referrals that are sort of candidly unreal. It is a mass of meaning in a collection of very dreamy and implausible images that have been stockpiled like postal cards of an eager but aimless tourist.
Being American is a very obsessive attempt for access to a symmetric proportion that is incomplete and flawed. It is a sphere ranging from contradiction and vanity to grief and disappointment; a society with extreme abstraction that encompasses a collection of lonely and woeful figures. A united nation but collaged with incongruous minorities; it is a frail statue full of tracks but integrated and powerful; an inverted metaphor of the Promised Land.
America is fast; it has ever-contracted and shivering muscles that resemble involuntary movements of a sleepwalker. It is a breathtaking magic in unique American style: fast food, skyscrapers, automatic guns, Hollywood and fear of terrorism.
The discovery of America is the macroscopic study of the cultural, ethnic and racial fusion that the newly founded American civilization has made its traditional functions artificial. It is a country whose endless variety of faces, tastes, and languages are no obstacles to its doubly awful human isolation.
But representation of America and the experience of being American is a multi-layer research into gaudy and bright arena with a harsh rhythm and full of people free from care, family men, patriotic individuals who have filled the city with all its streets and skyscrapers in a confused state. It is a brief contemplation for bringing to light the ever active racial, linguistic and gender gaps of an always bipolar socio-political sphere, with a flavor of liberalism and religion whose refracted mirror tries to reflect a pluralistic image of its social and popular contexts.
Restudy of America as a project in “America, Suspended Land” photo series by Mehrdad Afsari is putting together heterogeneous frames of astounding collaboration of spiritless population that displays overlaid frames of a modern catastrophe from the collapse of a ruined reality. It is an elegy for nonstop gaiety of full-fledged transformation; a comprehensive book of festival in a ceremony to unveil gradual collapse. It is the wishful accompanying of a restless traveler toward that hyper-real utopia.