Futureland, 2010

“The ‘megacity’ is a strange animal. Outsized and unruly, it seems to escape all definition and defy any representation. Maybe the mega- city is just a myth. A pure product of the imagination. A chimerical creature that only appears when we invoke it through an elaborate ritual that involves flying around the world and call- ing its name in as many languages and from as many sites and angles as possible. In, out, up, down, over and under.

This is pretty much what Nuno Cera did. He flew over Mexico City, dived deep into Shanghai, got lost in Dubai, searched for the edges of Jakarta, followed fictional paths driving through Los Angeles and walking through Istanbul, looked up at Hong Kong from the streets, jumped out of random train stations in Mumbai, and visited the roof tops of Cairo. Travelling through these multiple yet interconnected realities, he also reappropriated each of these cities as fictional constructs. (…)

None of Nuno’s images actually shows their object – the sharply defined megacity itself. It is to be found only in the quick blur occurring when we switch our attention from one image to the other. As if made from the gutter-space between each frame of a graphic novel. The megacity is nothing but a blur. A blur that swallows towns, villages and neighbourhoods.

A global megacities blur. A giga globurban spread that fuses everything together, even cities as distant and distinct as Los Angeles and Cairo. The globurban spread is the new Babylon. Welcome to Futureland: a greyish continuum stretching around the world like a gigantic cloud unifying all humans in a shared sense of utter confusion.”

- Matias Echanove & Rahul Srivastava, Futureland and the Global Urban Blur: Theorizing the work of Nuno Cera (2010)