Edward Kihn

United States, 2020, 48’

“Terrain Vague” is a 16mm photo-roman, based on the images and accompanying log of a fictional researcher who, over the summer of 2016, chronicles the development of a new private, university-based innovation centre from the shell of a former colour and coatings laboratory in a poor and working class Southwest Philadelphia neighbourhood - an industrial hub that shuttered in the wake of the crisis of 2008. In her investigations into the history of the site and its environs, her travels around the city (including a stop at the fateful 2016 Democratic National Convention), and her interactions with a beleaguered real estate agent, the researcher reflects on the cycles of ‘creative destruction’ that permanently transform the urban landscape, providing openings for new schemes and entrepreneurial science fictions.