Mélanie Smith

Born in 1965 in Poole (Great Britain), she lives in Mexico.

In Spiral City (2002) the regular and fluent circling movements of Melanie Smith’s camera brush over the rooftops of Mexico City. Filmed from above, the megacity gradually sinks into the distance, revealing its dense and seemingly endless urban fabric. Paradoxically, though, this imposing presence, which crushes any human scale, gives us a glimpse of a fault line: the fictive projection of its future and at the same time a possible image of its past. The urban landscape metamorphoses, suddenly offering the vision of a ruined city, that is silent, timeless and frozen.