I have not been blogging for a while. But here is a good reason for an announcement, in tune with the financial (and other) gloom and doom mood that’s sweeping the world.

Jacaranda Images, that nice little gallery off Rainbow Street in Jabal Amman, is showing 5 images entitled, Flooded London, Five Images of the Future:

Three hundred and forty years after the Great Fire of London comes the Great Flood – but the flood of 2090 is a different order of catastrophe altogether…

London in the 1660s was awash with predictions of doom and gloom as one disaster piled on another – the plague was raging, a tornado strode up the Thames, the Great Fire gutted the City of London. The end of the world was surely nigh… Yet somehow the world – and London – survived.

Now, in the early 21st century, with doom and gloom back in fashion. Nick Taylor and the company Squint/Opera wanted to portray a London of the future, after today’s environmental doomsday predictions have played themselves out. This realisation of a London taken back by the sea is curiously utopian – we see life carrying on, and people still finding moments for creativity and enjoyment.
The five images of ‘Flooded London’ are snapshots of people’s lives some time after the catastrophe, obliquely depicting adaptations to a near-deserted urban environment where an office block like Canary Wharf is a place to go fishing and a street in Honor Oak turns into a slipway. The catastrophic side of the sea coming in has long since past and the images are snapshots of people going about their lives, having adapted to the city’s new circumstance.

Squint/Opera, an award-winning film and media studio which produces films, animations, web sites and installations, used photography, 3D modelling and image manipulation to imitate the techniques and aesthetic of Victorian landscape painters. Exaggerated details play with scale to present images that conceal their composition. The series of fantastical 3d images have been on display as part of the London Architecture Festival in the summer of 2008.

See you there..
FLOODED LONDON – FIVE IMAGES OF THE FUTURE

Five images of London after the imaginary Great Flood of 2090, by the UK group Squint/Opera are exhibited at Jacaranda Images, 1st Circle from 5 to 30 April 2009. Tel +962 6 4644050.