In February, a dreamy, sleek – albeit inflatable – beach villa popped up on the pristine sands of Dubai’s World Islands. “The Idealised City,” an installation by Italian multidisciplinary artist Filippo Minelli derived from stock images, was conceived as an idealized representation of hundreds of proposed real estate developments in coastal cities worldwide. Later featured as the centerpiece in his ongoing eponymous solo show, the installation and exhibition examine the human relationship to architecture and urban space. The exhibition focuses on Dubai, a diverse city whose architecture constantly adapts to accommodate different uses and a growing population.

Filippo’s practice more broadly examines contemporary landscapes, urban identity, and cultural dynamics in a post-globalized world. His recent projects have taken him around the Gulf, Europe, and South America, but his latest endeavor brought him to Inloco Gallery, a new urban art-focused creative space at Dubai’s Al Khayat Avenue.

The exhibition is an interdisciplinary project born out of several years of research in the United Arab Emirates, which Filippo first visited in 2021. Despite having planned a short trip, a second wave of coronavirus travel restrictions forced Filippo to stay in the UAE for six months, where he remained “investigating, photographing, documenting, and researching” unhindered by looming deadlines. “And that’s basically how it all happened – like, it’s the story of my life. It’s always quite chaotic and spontaneous, and I’m not the kind of researcher who goes somewhere with a task. But my life is deeply interconnected with my artistic practice. So, I think it helps in doing and undoing, building impressions and demolishing them, as much as urbanism builds and destroys in the UAE, in order to stay on top of the game,” Filippo told AGSIW.

Comprising photography, installation, video, and even a metaverse component, the exhibition draws on Renaissance architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti’s 15th-century writings on urban planning and development, which suggest “that cities should be designed with specialized architecture for each population segment.” It is also influenced by Islamic philosopher Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi’s “Virtuous City,” which favors a more value-driven, fluid, and adaptable approach to building cities. Filippo examines how globalization and ease of movement have altered, or even rendered insignificant, what it means for architecture and the urban fabric to physically reflect the identities of its inhabitants. When the nomadic history of a place involves constant relocation and adaptation, how can architects reflect that heritage?

Filippo’s show also looks at what “ideal” means to individuals around the world and how their projection of utopia shapes their everyday interactions with a city’s urban fabric. The “Paisagem C/A” series in the show, comprised of 24 photographs taken by the artist around Dubai’s historic Deira neighborhood, depicts shops and hotels named after cities from around the world, such as Lagos, Manila, Osaka, and Istanbul.

Filippo explained that, “Some of the stores were owned by people coming from those places who therefore wanted to humbly appropriate the identity of those places due to a narrative about the products that were inside, while some other stores might have initially opened in the same way but are now owned by completely different owners who simply kept the name. That’s the most interesting part to me because it shows this kind of idealized approach to narrations and interpretations of images.”

Whether the interior aesthetic of the spaces Filippo photographed reflected the aesthetics of the cities whose names they borrowed did not matter. Rather, it is the image of that place – no matter how rooted in its current reality – that drives the imagination and feeds the shop owner’s livelihood. The process of naming their shops signifies an idealization of a city and an attempt to embody and project the spirit of that place.

Similarly, Filippo’s “Paysage” series, which includes nine diptychs (artwork comprising two pieces or panels), depicts hoardings from around the world. The hoardings – decorative facades that surround construction sites to reduce visual disruption – cover billboards, buildings, and cars and are shown alongside a hoarded counterpart from the other side of the world. These facade coverings often replicate their surroundings to provide a seamless aesthetic experience and project an idealized version of the spaces they veil, whether in nostalgic longing for a previous version of the building or hopeful anticipation for an impending project completion.

The sceneries captured by Filippo contain varying degrees of detail and visual accuracy. Some of the hoardings are nearly impossible to distinguish from their backdrop save for the telltale wrinkles of draped tarps. Others are more abstract, offering “speculations about how buildings could look in the future” or depicting “random renderings of the idealized version of what will happen behind this facade,” Filippo explained.

The centerpiece of the exhibition, an inflatable version of a perfect, albeit generic, beachside villa, takes the notion of idealized living even further. “The inflatables are completely made from digital images … This, I would say, is the final part of this penetration in between the physical landscape and the digital landscape to idealize and sell an idea of a lifestyle rather than the lifestyle itself.”

“The Idealised City,” the inflatable installation from which the exhibition takes its name, consists of a two-story stock image villa, holographic and silver palm trees, generic visual pool textures, a crisp blue sky, and a sun. Filippo shared that this installation was among the first elements he conceived of for the exhibition, inspired by “all these renderings that you see in real estate advertising around Dubai or all these big billboards with incredible renderings of the new developments around the city.” He continued, that compared to the Deira work, “the inflatables are some kind of ‘on steroids’ version of these idealized images or approaches.” Filippo noted that these two works complement one another because “the shop names with different cities and different identities displayed offer a glimpse of the first approaches to idealization in public space.”

This inflatable installation was first shown briefly on one of the World Islands, a manufactured archipelago off the coast of Dubai, few of which are developed and in use. Designed as an idyllic and secluded set of beachfront properties, this setting made an appropriate backdrop for Filippo’s fictitious rendering of the idealized lifestyle commercialized by property developers worldwide. “This intervention in essence is not about how we differ but about how similar we are,” the exhibition’s press release explained. “The surreal environment underscores the intervention’s core themes: the fluidity of identity and the quest for an idealized urban experience that transcends the traditional architectural and cultural paradigms.”

Filippo’s urban landscape and contemporary architectural ruminations suggest that these real estate advertisements feed on common human dreams and aspirations – for comfortable, luxurious, and sleek living – while in turn fueling identities. Comparing the architectural legacy of his home country of Italy to cities in the Gulf, Filippo said, “If you start from a background from Europe or other places that have a bigger and wider relation to history in terms of architectural artifacts and layers of historical artifacts in public space or in cities in general, you might think there’s no authenticity in the Gulf or in Dubai in this case. But that’s also the reason why I wanted to challenge the contemporary notion of authenticity.”

He continued, “For example, in Italy, there is of course an incredible richness of architecture and details in the landscape that remind you of a hypothetical identity and these glorious things from the past,” but, he argued, these cultural assets do not necessarily reflect contemporary Italian identity. Filippo posited whether, perhaps, this architectural and cultural heritage is just a lavish backdrop that “is actually there to hide the lack of an authentic contemporary proposal nowadays.”

The banalization of local or historic architecture as a result of globalization – seen, for instance, in homogenized airport or mall dining and shopping options worldwide – has also begun to shape collective identities and blur the lines that once distinguished a more localized sense of self, Filippo suggested.

And this, ultimately, is the aim of Filippo’s works in “The Idealised City”: “As an artist, I think that what we do and what we should aim for is not just the creation of objects but to use these objects to create space for understanding and thought.” In juxtaposing visions of idealized realities from Dubai and elsewhere alongside contemporary architectural styles that are employed worldwide, Filippo bridges the gap between narratives of inauthenticity in Gulf cities and the prevailing architecture of globalization everywhere.