I read about world fairs and utopias while I was curating the Dreams of Progress exhibition last year. A utopia, or a heterotopia such as the world expo, always features inconsistencies or misconceptions. If not, the utopia could be achieved and it would not be a utopia anymore. However, never the inconsistencies of today’s world appeared to me clearer than on the Shanghai World Expo.
The “Better city, better life” official theme of the Shanghai World Fair was an excellent choice. It encapsulated all that needs to be addressed nowadays: sustainability, globalisation, urbanisation, fairness between the poor and the rich. The right questions were asked. However, the states and corporations present at the expo showed how unconvincing their answers were. Their self-interest and reliance on established industries lead them to the most desperate and risible rhetoric, see my previous posts for some examples.
The solution to all our problems is technology according to the participants of the Expo. Yet, and as far as I know, none of the big pavilions had an absolute zero impact on the environment. Instead, a splash of energetically very demanding presentations explained to the audience that some symbolic features of the buildings were sustainable, a non-sense.
Throughout my visit, oil companies, car manufacturers, heavy industries told me that their technology will bring soon a solution to the challenges that the world is facing. And the only role of the national pavilions was to repeat the absurd solutions that their biggest industries had to sell. How lower a national self-esteem could be?
The best place to experience these contradictions was in the area of the Expo devoted to industries. There, I was being told that I will have a better life thanks to bigger boats, more oil and concept GM cars; Answers that were totally inadequate and only increased my feeling of insecurity. To be fair, there were some good intentions and ideas at the Expo, and technology is surely part of the solution. But they were squeezed in an absurd vision serving national and supranational short-term interests.
- The China State Shipbuilding Corporation believes that a better future resides in bigger boats.
- I like and don’t like the CSSC building, it is a very interesting combination of industrial and ship structures that forms a building intended for leisure.
- Using this mobile device, you choose and collect your dreams, which are in fact products. I wonder what they will do with the data?
- In the Shanghai pavilion, you clap your hands to produce energy. These kind of interactions work very well with the Chinese audience, but are symbolic and full of contradictions (clapping my hands was surely not enough to pay the bill of electricity for the pavilion).
- The pavilion of Future is a good illustration of the word ‘uncanny’, it is huge and tries to promote a better future with a big exhibition budget. The result is cold, technological and full of white anonymous bodies.
In his book, Jay Winter explained how the Paris World Fair of 1937 was a desperate invocation of the illuminations of technology to prevent another war. Reality was not long to impose itself. Let’s hope that history will give us more time to resolve our incapacity to face limited resources on earth.
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