Coastland

We are all familiar with beach holiday postcards. The skies are eternally blue, the waters serene and the buildings flawless. But is there more to these pictures? Fascinated by the post-war modernist architecture of the western Black Sea Coast, Miruna Dunu uses authentic postcards from her own collection to explore the fabricated hyperreality that such buildings embody.

The postcards were circulated widely between the 1960s and 1980s as visual propaganda, consistently depicting the seaside leisure developments in a blaze of alluring perfection. However, the idealised and limited visual vocabulary of the postcard deliberately edits out the micro-stories that contradict the projected image. Historical research reveals a darker reality. The project treats architecture as information and examines how it is generated, disseminated and experienced.
In the film ‘Coastland’, Dunu projects a new, fictional scenario onto the postcard idyll. It is a cyclical story of destruction and rebuilding; the unreal once again presented through the lens of the hyperreal. “The speculative future scenes appear to be a solution. However, the proper understanding of the spatial situation reveals that the coastal resorts cannot escape their own premise,” explains Miruna.