COLONIA ESTATES
Started: 2019
Status: Ongoing
Main Language: Spanish
URL: coloniaestates.com
Summary:
Colonia Estates operates as a fictional real estate developer that explores how colonial structures persist in contemporary forms such as gentrification, displacement, and urban inequality. Through speculative developments presented as plausible projects, the work examines how desire, capital, and infrastructure intersect in the production of urban space.
Across different iterations, the project uses the visual and narrative languages of real estate marketing; renders, videos, brochures, give-aways billboards, and websites, not to promote an actual development, but to momentarily bring it into existence within public perception. These materials mimic the aesthetics and strategies of luxury real estate, blurring the line between speculation and reality.
The project is also informed by my early work with virtual real estate economies since 2007, where speculative value operates independently from physical constraints. This logic extends into Colonia Estates, where fictional developments are anchored in real crises, like housing shortages, water scarcity, and the privatization of space, allowing speculation to feed on existing conditions.
Rather than imagining distant futures, this project operates within a displaced present, where these scenarios already feel possible. What makes the project unsettling is not its fictional nature, but the sense that it reflects an ongoing and perhaps inevitable trajectory.
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