This exhibition is a case study located in Salford, UK, once firmly fixed in the national imagination as the archetypal industrial city. Like many cities across the world today, Salford is attempting to morph itself into a contemporary landscape of chic residential tower blocks, waterside apartments, and stylish creative industry hubs. Situating this real estate revolution within Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of ‘creative destruction’, van Aitken's research navigates this emergent landscape in which the apartment has now become a dominant commodity form, replacing textiles and engineering.
The work employs expanded and traditional documentary practices to visualise the processual, material and spatial configurations which characterise creative destruction. In its various cycles and stages, creative destruction is a dynamic, consequential force, which van Aitken's research reveals as active at a granular level in the sites and spaces under investigation. Confronting such a radical disruptive energy, the photographic works in this exhibition are unstable, evoking the processual flux and material turmoil beneath the smooth surface of our new cities.