To break this silence that I negligently afforded by adjusting myself to the job and house market circumstances in the UK the last two months, I have to start with my most recent experience.
Being lucky enough to spend four days at the World Travel Market in ExCel, London Docklands, last week, I have a picture story from my phone to tell; and apart from sharing my fatigue with the rest of the financial labour workforce on DLR those days. The latter experience is equally traumatic, but I will start now from the impressions of how national stands at the Fair produced the pictures of the imagined land on their territories.
I deeply admire the inventiveness to make an asset out of the desert, but there is a very funny combination of the 'serious' financial districts' models and the leisure resorts with architects like Frank Gehry pushed to the fore, to securitize (and I am not sure if I should use that word here, but try thinking of it metaphorically) the playfulness of the whole project or the high art values.
On the stand of United Arab Emirates you could take a picture of yourself in one of the luxury cabin aircraft chambers with the tacitly charming stewardess. Apart from that work&pleasure principle, you could have a pure exoticized European-looking lady playing with an eagle in her hands, happily posing for the visitors of the fair (who are, to stress that - also the businessmen fellas from the other countries, as the Fair is not open for the citizens and average mortals). White, beautiful and mute, I bet they had a message here to share between the lines.
Please, enjoy the pictures, as what is documented after the crash says completely the opposite. The building sites in Abu Dhabi have been abandoned for months now and there is only sand and security awaiting for the glitzy towers and ever new airports. Sorry for the blurriness, it is a result of my flirting with the treasury keepers in order to mask my disgust by the engulfing amount of fake Ives Klein around.
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