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Darren Wardle and Brie Trenerry,
Zone d (Richter’s Rockets), 2026. MP4 digital video, 9:11 mins.
Zone d reassembles footage of three brutalist apartment towers in Zagreb, designed by Yugoslav architect Vjenceslav Richter, into a fragmented meditation on structural decay and historical transition. Filmed from a first-person perspective, the work implicates the viewer in an encounter with Socialist Modern architecture suspended between endurance and collapse. A vertical triptych echoes the proportions of the towers while drawing on the compositional traditions of painting and the labyrinthine spatial logic of Piranesi's Carceri. Through looping sequences of fractured viewpoints, deteriorating concrete, graffiti, and detritus, the work merges documentary observation with imagined projection. Its non-narrative structure discards linear time, presenting ruin as an ongoing process of transformation rather than a completed event. By arresting a fleeting moment within a cycle of decline, Zone d reflects the instability of monumental architecture and the ways history becomes materialised through the inexorable processes of decay.