תַּרְשִׁימֵי עָרִים פוֹרֶנְזִיִּים

Forensic City Plans

Forensic City Plans (From Leftovers), 2025

The series explores two temporal states of a city—the moment before its birth and an undefined time after its destruction. It moves between two extremes: visionary architectural blueprints filled with ambition and ruins frozen in time, stripped of their meaning. The works merge the utopian with the apocalyptic, juxtaposing conceptual architectural plans created with faith in the future against an urban landscape that has become an uninhabitable demolition site.

The series consists of three recurring visual layers in each work. The aerial photograph of a ruined city presents a frozen moment of an unavoidable outcome, an archival record of the city at an unknown point after the catastrophe. The architectural concept sketch depicts the city as envisioned, just before its construction—a layout of streets, boulevards, buildings, and possibilities that were never realized, drawn lines embodying a future that never materialized. Finally, the composite image—an overlay of the utopian plan atop the concrete destruction—creates an intersection between past and future, between what was erased and what will never be. The old plans become ghostly leftovers of the place that once existed.

Each piece is a field of leftovers—leftovers of construction, of vision, of a city, of a human civilization that sought to thrive—yet ultimately became just another erased layer in the accumulating mound of history.

This project does not document any specific disaster, nor does it identify the cities it is based on. Instead, it raises forensic questions: Are these the ruins of familiar wars? Are these cities that were never built? Perhaps Berlin, had it never been reconstructed? London, had it never been bombed? New York, had Ground Zero continued expanding?

Through the technique of multi-layered imagery, a constant tension emerges between architectural planning and its real-world outcome. The planned streets float above the ruins, building markers rest upon vacant lots, bridges and public structures remain as delicate outlines above scorched terrain. The architectural blueprint lingers like a ghost above the city’s wreckage. Modernist lines, digital transparency, and building markers transform into a fragile network of memory, a map of absence. The blurring between presence and void, between structure and collapse, turns the viewer into an archaeologist of urban layers that will never exist again.

"Forensic City Plans" is a direct continuation of Leftovers' engagement with memory, archaeology, and post-trauma. It does not present cities as fixed historical artifacts but as spaces that time insists on reconstructing, erasing, and rebuilding, over and over—until the distinction between the master plan and the leftovers of destruction disappears entirely.