The artist built miniature utopias out of cardboard, toothpicks and cigarette packets. They provide a colourful antidote to drab modern metropolises
By S.H. | NEW YORK
“A NATION that can’t make models is a nation that doesn’t understand things, a nation that doesn’t live,” said Bodys Isek Kingelez. The figurative meaning of the Congolese artist’s words resonates: poor planning has led to instability, financial ruin and crises of all kinds in countries around the world. But for Kingelez “models” were also literal. He made his statement while slicing and gluing strips of plastic to make a small skyscraper for one of his fantastical cityscapes.
Kingelez built miniature utopias out of toothpicks, cardboard, bottle caps, cigarette cartons, Coke cans and even razor blades. They are astonishingly intricate, down to the cartoonish trees on the tiny pavements. More than 30 of his models are now on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in Kingelez’s first major American retrospective since his death in 2015. There is a political undercurrent to his work: he imagined a state without police and a better hospital for AIDS patients. But first and foremost, his models are visual treats.
Contemporary cities, at least in the United States, are often uninspiring. High-rises in shades of grey, black and brown stack the skylines. Strip malls and freeways sprawl so endlessly that it is hard even to locate a city. Every urban space has spots of colour, but they have become harder to find. Many metropolises are dysfunctional: public transport is in decline, housing is scarce, pipes are decaying and water is contaminated.
Kingelez’s imagined cities, by contrast, are meticulously planned, luminous and stunning. They are reminiscent of “Candy Land” and Coney Island, perhaps because only board games and amusement parks are so fun and bright. Yet they are also detailed and serious: Kingelez was committed to the belief that better-designed cities would make a better world. He was interested in problem-solving and the basics of city life, right down to airports and motels.
Kingelez wanted to redesign his home city of Kinshasa, when Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorial regime controlled what was then Zaire. Mobutu embarked on ambitious building projects, some of which directly inspired Kingelez’s work. But he became increasingly dissatisfied both with Mobutu’s inability to provide basic infrastructure for the growing population and with the aesthetic of the capital city itself. “Kinshasa’s beauty is undying, but still, it has completely gone to waste,” he said. He built “Kinshasa La Belle” (pictured), a whimsical version of the capital, in a light blue pagoda-like structure. It draws on architectural influences that existed in Kinshasa—particularly the Belgian Art Deco style—but it is also something else entirely, a dream in paper.
He designed other model cities and buildings for places around the globe. One, called “Centrale Palestinienne”, is clad in the colours of the Palestinian flag: it was created around the time of the first Oslo Accord in 1993, which established the right to Palestinian self-government. It has a tower like a minaret, and a gate labelled “Jerico” in honour of the first city to be handed over to the Palestinian Authority. He designed a miniature United Nations building in bold primary colours and Art Deco shapes, ringed with stars to represent the member countries. These structures are hopeful about nationhood and diplomacy.
But some of the best works are not tied to a place at all. Kingelez’s largest model, “Ville Fantôme” (1996, pictured top) is like nowhere in the world, but includes elements of everywhere. There are the practical trappings of a city: a post office, a hospital, bright green roads; he even marks attractive areas for “parking”. Kingelez described it as a state with no police or soldiers. “It’s a melting pot of all races in the world. Here you live in paradise, just like heaven,” he said. The viewer could get lost in the details of “Ville Fantôme” for hours and not see it all.
As such, Kingelez’s models offer a positive perspective on globalisation and cultural hybridity. One work is built from Coca Cola cans, Becks beer cans and Lipton tea cartons. His cities are dotted with flags of all kinds. Japanese architectural influences are everywhere in his work, as are touches of Art Deco and colonial styles. He was also a believer in the skyscraper as a global symbol of the shining metropolis. “A city without high-rise buildings is a dead city,” he said. So he breathed new life into high-rises, in strange and intricate shapes, and in electric hues.
His work isn’t all brightness and optimism. Utopias often contain nightmarish elements, and Kingelez’s are no different. There are otherworldly features, as in “Ville Fantôme”, which has a pont de la mort (bridge of death). In this city ghosts walk among the living, and the living among the dead; it’s a paradise, but a ghostly one. Indeed any of his cities, built to scale, might be too much: too much strangeness, too much incongruity, too much colour.
His models are acts of vivid, obsessive imagination, and radically hopeful about the possibilities both of cities and design. His plans are unique both for their commitment to practicality and how completely untethered they are to reality. They may not be models that should or even could be built, but they’re extraordinary antidotes to the humdrum cities in which much of mankind lives.
“Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams” is showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until January 1st
