Empty Futures: Architectures of Desire and Abandonment - Exhibition at Gallery VI PER

Galerie VI cordially invites you to the opening of the exhibition Vacant Futures: Architectures of Desire and Abandonment, prepared by Michaela Büsse, and the accompanying guided tour. Visions of the urban future abound in planning documents, architectural competitions, political mandates, and marketing brochures: vertical gardens climbing up skyscrapers, seamless systems for climate and energy management, autonomous mobility, waterfront promenades bubbling with cosmopolitan leisure. These images promise sustainability and connectivity, yet remain oddly placeless, detached from the chaotic reality of local conditions and material constraints. They emerge from the global cycle of capital and design, projecting a universal aesthetic of progress, in which the future appears inevitable, merely waiting to be built. But what happens when these plans stall, collapse, or are never realized and inhabited? What remains when smart cities fall silent, when speculative development projects are halted mid-construction, or when infrastructure stands empty of its users? The exhibition Vacant Futures focuses on abandoned landscapes, unwanted inhabited environments, and strange urban shells – the remnants of ambitious plans that were never fully realized. Through film, visual, and research works, the exhibition explores eco-smart cities as promises, failures, and spaces where unexpected forms of life emerge.
The centerpiece of this exploration is the architectural render, which is more than just a representational tool; it is a speculative device that shapes beliefs, drives investments, and compresses effort into a single hyper-realistic frame. In the exhibition Vacant Futures, renders are placed alongside material from field research, revealing the chasm between projection and lived reality.
At its core are two films by Michaela Büsse: Overcast (2025), set in the nearly abandoned Forest City project in Malaysian Johor, and White Elephant (2022), filmed in the halted Melaka Gateway project. Both films trace the contradictions of speculative urbanism. In a state of suspension, these places become landscapes that are both haunting and persistent, where animals, plants, and people utilize spaces that were never intended for them. By tracking the city from polished renders to the mined riverbed, the exhibition Vacant Futures foregrounds the aesthetics, materiality, and politics of speculative urbanism. It asks: What futures do we envision, for whom are they meant, and what possibilities emerge when they remain unfulfilled?
Michaela Büsse is an interdisciplinary researcher, filmmaker, and postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University of Dresden. Her work engages with environmental speculation and emerging material and spatial configurations in the context of planetary urbanization and the climate crisis. Based on visual ethnography and field research, she examines how future imaginaries materialize – and often disintegrate – through architectural, ecological, and technological interventions. Michaela Büsse has presented her work internationally in academic, artistic, and curatorial contexts.