/  Home /  News /  Part #6 Madrid, Spain /  Part #5 ProMidNord /  Part #4 Sundsberg - Sveaborg /  Part #3 Moss, Norway /  Part #2 Porto, Portugal /     Part #1 Helsinki, Finland /  Part #0 Helsinki, Finland / Videos / CV / Contact / Oskar Lindström / Martijn van Berkum		Part #1 Helsinki, Finland /  Year: 2003 /  Method: Billboard in public space /  Produced with support by Fonds BKVB and the Netherlands Embassy in Helsinki /  Carried out in co-operation with NIFCA, the Helsinki City Art Museum and Muu.ry In short Part #1 deals with the construction of an enormous shopping mall in the center of Helsinki. It aims at undoing the utopian image that construction billboards usually present and reveal the destruction it attempts to cover up. Background Construction billboards generally function to simulate an anticipated reality, a future utopia. But they can also be read the other way around and one can argue that reality in fact is a simulation of the billboard. In case of the new Kauppi Center in Helsinki, it depicts a hyper reality in which all consumer unfriendly elements have been taken out and the future is represented as a streamlined environment in which shopping is optimized by a network of living, working and infrastructure. Our billboard is a hacking of that visual rhetoric and an attempt to undo the simulation and restore reality as it was at that moment: a big hole in the ground. An image that reveals what the economist Schumpeter refers to as creative destruction. A process vital to capitalism, which describes how economic growth requires radical change.