In Quang Lam's recent series 'Hong Kong 2047' the photographer alternates some vertical portraits of grotesque skyscrapers, depicted almost as if they were totems, with close-up images of remote control and surveillance systems. The cold linear, anonymous, vanishing geometries of these buildings are a reflection of the modern city condition. In it, we read the canons and the characteristics of that chase to heaven, which is a challenge to eternity rather than to height. In the dense urban fabric of Hong Kong often cited by photographers, among all the late Michael Wolf, this form of constructive rationality is notoriously extreme. Here, the control of the land, contended historically until today, appears almost a translation of that infinite battle of saturation of the world. As inclusive totalitarianism from which one cannot escape. And this is why another form of control creeps into the city. Behind the technological devices that register and file citizens, behind this instrumentalization of the more or less induced need for security, there is a structure dedicated to monitoring the dynamics of infinite growth. A paradigm that appears as paradoxical as the concept of world order, which forces all peoples into a new form of imprisonment. In this sense, it is useful to quote Michel Foucalt in Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975). A prison is somehow a new form of technological power with its own language, not just verbal. Like the prison told by John Carpenter in 1981 in the science fiction action film Escape from New York, in which the island of Manhattan in 1997 became the prison/theater of society's outcasts. Similarly, the Quang Lam series is a vision projected in 2047, in a dystopian environment dominated by camera controls, drone surveillance, artificial intelligence, computerized buildings, air pollution. In this scenario of asphalt, concrete, and glass, the last losers of globalization move like heroes of an elusive resistance. Somehow these images photograph an urban condition rather than a city itself. They are so damned topical!

© Quang Lam from the series 'Hong Kong 2047'

© Quang Lam from the series 'Hong Kong 2047'

© Quang Lam from the series 'Hong Kong 2047'

© Quang Lam from the series 'Hong Kong 2047'

© Quang Lam from the series 'Hong Kong 2047'

© Quang Lam from the series 'Hong Kong 2047'

This condition finds a reverse in a sort of rebellious imaginary opposed to an oppressive hood, like a gray sky from which no sun filters. To put it in the words of Ernst Jünger, a resistance to automatism, against the path already traced, against the "just do it" adaptation, against the homologation of mass civilization. We are looking at rooms that challenge the obvious, the dominant line of conduct. From this point of view, I find the photos I received from Vyacheslav Onishchenko that portray young boys in small rock concerts very curious. They made me immediately think of the 1991 Monster of Rock in Moscow. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989. And the young Russians finally showed off their desire to have fun like all the boys of their age. The desire for rebellion or to break a historical continuity, a monotony, to disagree also musically. To say no. These photographs express very well the energy that comes from breaking with ordinary and pre-established consent. We feel something pre-rational and typically adolescent. It is the "Jungle" opposed to Plato's cave, which nevertheless masks a trap. In fact, rebellion as an end in itself could turn out to be a form of imprisonment. The condition of disenchantment, which is the opposite of that of stateless adaptation to the dominant catechism, is inscribed in a sort of fatalism, or of letting things be outside the Jungle. Perhaps the solution lies in asking how to explain to the people in the cave the existence of the sun. Liberation does not lie in seeing the sun, but in returning to the cave where it is dark and only images of reality flow, to convey the truth against false opinions. And Plato warns us that there will be people ready to fight to stay in the cave. Is this a task of photography, or just an exclusive task of philosophy?

© Vyacheslav Onishchenko from the series 'Live Fast Die Young'

© Vyacheslav Onishchenko from the series 'Live Fast Die Young'

© Vyacheslav Onishchenko from the series 'Live Fast Die Young'

© Vyacheslav Onishchenko from the series 'Live Fast Die Young'

© Vyacheslav Onishchenko from the series 'Live Fast Die Young'

True rebellion is what calls into question the preconstituted order, not that it neglects it in favor of a permanently anarchic or hedonistic immaturity. In fact, transgression and enjoyment today have become a consumerist act. So the relationship with the world is only functional to an egotistic, falsely revolutionary satisfaction. This is why today's techno-capitalist and depoliticized dictatorship is much more nuanced than the typical nationalist twentieth-century dictatorships. The role of the rebel, Jung would say, is to emphasize the nomos. Or capacity for self-organization against a society that wants adults as eternal infants at the mercy of infinite and often morbid enjoyments. A society that increasingly resembles a luna-park of instant and "on-demand" pleasure. A "pay per click" life, within an oedipal and deregulated prison.