Live the Life You Have Always Imagined
London, United Kingdom and Hyderabad, India, 2018
Through site-specific audio tours, walking-guide books, a website and billboard,
Live The Life You Have Always Imagined raises awareness on the role marketing plays in the housing crisis.
Live the Life You Have Always Imagined seeks to show developers' different perceptions and preconceptions of the same area and their varying ideas for shaping it to best suit their desired investors. This interest is addressed through pre-recorded audio tours, the content and language of which, are derived from each developer’s marketing materials. The tour can be accessed by scanning a QR code at every stop on the route of the 196 bus from Wandsworth to Elephant and Castle in South London, and by a car driving on the Outer Ring Road from Nanakramguda to Neknampur in Hyderabad. The QR code leads to a website, which in addition to the soundtrack has a video for someone who cannot visit the site in person. Since the QR and the website are essential to the outreach of the project, a billboard on the Wandsworth road will display both for a duration of two weeks.
Rapid development, due to the rapid influx of capital brings with it rapid marketing. The relation between the three is an endless loop, operating at such a speed, that the content of a marketing campaign bears little relevance to the present.
At the end of the audio tours, guided-walk books lead the audience through the same sites but in the opposite direction. Unlike the audio tours which discuss the future’s perfect visions for the sites, the guided-walk books remain true to their surroundings, aiming to record them at exactly this moment in time.
