Birgit Naomi Glatzel, Ideal City – Photography

Birgit Naomi Glatzel      IDEAL CITY – Photography

In the exhibition IDEAL CITY, we present a project by Berlin-based artist Birgit Naomi Glatzel in which public spaces from cities around the world are combined to form new, imaginary urban spaces. Architecture and locations from the areas of service, transport and leisure are removed from their original context and recombined. This open-ended project has been growing steadily since 2003 and invites visitors to understand the city as a changeable, open idea.

With Ideal City, Birgit Naomi Glatzel has been developing an open artistic system since 2003 that reassembles urban spaces and questions familiar notions of city, identity and belonging. In the exhibition, this system appears as a visual, sonic and interactive structure – as a city in a state of permanent possibility.

The starting point for the project is a playful yet profound principle of recombination: inspired by Kro-gu-fant, a pop-up picture book by artist Sara Ball in which fragmented animal bodies are combined to create new, hybrid creatures, Ideal City transfers this process to the structure of cities. Instead of body parts, architectural, social and functional features of urban spaces are reassembled – imagining cities that never existed, yet still seem familiar.

Ideal City works with locations from cities around the world that are assigned to three basic categories: service, transport and leisure. These categories form the structural basis of modern urbanity – regardless of continent, political system or cultural background. Markets, shopping centres, transport hubs, stadiums, beaches and squares are removed from their geographical, cultural and historical context and transferred into a modular image system. Within this system, they enter into new, unfamiliar relationships with each other and lose their clear attribution. A place is no longer ‘Berlin,’ ‘Tel Aviv’ or ‘Tbilisi,’ but part of a new, hybrid context.

A central part of Ideal City is the interactive component. Via a computer interface or by exchanging images on a wall, visitors are invited to design their own ‘favourite city’ by combining public spaces according to their individual preferences. The Brandenburg Gate can border directly on the beach in Tel Aviv, and a shopping centre in Tel Aviv can be located next to the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. These free combinations open up utopian, sometimes absurd urban landscapes that question existing notions of urbanity, identity and belonging.

The merging of cities not only creates a new image, but also a new name: the combination of Berlin, Venice and Tbilisi, for example, becomes BENESI. These name creations are more than just playful word creations. They mark the emergence of new, hybrid identities and point to the possibility of thinking of the city as a collective, changeable construct – beyond national borders or historical fixations.

Curatorially, Ideal City moves at the intersection of photography, digital image production, sound, design and participatory art. The collaboration between Birgit Naomi Glatzel and Hennink Stöve (concept & algorithms), Marc Weiser (sound design) and editienne (poster design) underlines the interdisciplinary approach of the project. Image, sound and interface intertwine to create an immersive experience in which the city is not only viewed but actively shaped.

The clear visual language, modular structure and openness to participation reflect a contemporary understanding of exhibitions as places of exchange – not as self-contained narratives, but as offerings. Ideal City is not a blueprint for a better city, but an invitation to understand the city as a process – as something composed of fragments, constantly changing and shaped by those who move within it.

Birgit Naomi Glatzel (*1970 in Kempten/Allgäu, Germany) is a freelance conceptual artist and architect. She has worked mainly in the field of photography since 1998. She began her photo project ‘a friend is a friend of a friend’ in the summer of 1998 and has attracted international attention. Among others her works have been shown at the Tirana Biennale, the Venice Biennale, in Berlin (including at the Jewish Museum), Jerusalem, Paris, Kiev and at Photo London 2024. Birgit Glatzel lives and works in Berlin.

More information about the artist you find here.