Pictures scanned, check. Website on, check. Images uploaded, check. Ok and now rip it up and start again. Yes, when you start a trip with an idea, usually you end up with something else, we’re not here to respect the schedule. This project is a trip, where you get lost in places you wouldn’t want to be, where behind the corner there’s some unexpected beauty, where you find the way out from the maze.

brutalist Holborn with father and daughter

The first idea was to make pictures about the London area to be redeveloped for the 2012 olympics, showing how the image that this city try (successfully I guess) to cast to the world through the media is different from the real life. We were tryin to dig under the weight of thousands of thousands postcards and stereotypes, the Queen’s yellows outfits, the tea time, the London eye, the O2 dome, Regent and Oxford street, artificial stages, olympic cathedrals in the desert (why the Stratford park appear as a blank space on the London map ?) all mixed in a pre-recorded tape for tourism and customer’s consumption. We are tryin to see what’s under the curtain of stale images about Camden town, Portobello road, the swinging 60s, 1o Downing street and all the London’s modern mythology and cliches.

Then we had a selection of fiftish pictures, with a beginning and an end, showing a thesis in a documentary kind of style. A complete sequence, organic and nice. And then we realized that London as we see it is not like this, doesn’t have a defined beginning and an end, and try to attach them in a story-like frame was like the kind of media mystification of reality : from an infinite reality extract a couple of things you think are important to build up a story and support one or another point of view. Fallen Empire is still about the Olympics, just because it’s about here and now in London, and the olympic’s madness is an unavoidable part of the city. We’ve switched from an inductive to a deductive way of seeing: instead of going around knowing already what to look for, we were examining what we found  without any preconceived idea about how to introduce our city.

Of course the map is not the territory and you can’t show 100% of your perception, but we tried not to sticking to an already written screenplay.

We don’t want a pamphlet, we want a city.

Working with a preconcept idea we were missing lots of the accident and casual encounter that at first sight don’t make sense at all. Now we’re tryin to include them in the wave a city is, like a rollercoaster: up and down. With the new selection (90 pics and counting) we are breaking free from the screenplay. A friend of mine once told about London, “if you are high this city lift you higher, but if you are down on your luck you’re going to scrap the bottom”. There’s space for the beautiful and the dreadful, sometimes in one square mile you can travel through the world and social classes.

This is what people do when they write or shot a book, they’re building a city, and now Fallen Empire is a city, real and imaginary at the same time. I hope in this city you’ll enjoy to get lost.