City in Porn
Silvan Hagenbrock is an urban and multimedia artist working at the intersection of art, urbanism, and moving images. His practice explores how cities are shaped by social, cultural, and historical forces, often using video as a tool for storytelling, research, and speculation.
He studied Social Design – Art as Urban Innovation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Urban Studies at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and Tongji University Shanghai. His work combines critical urbanism with artistic research, focusing on themes like postcolonial memory, public space, and car-free futures.
Silvan is co-founder of the art and research collective Raumstation and the performance group lingsanling, which has explored topics like German colonial history in China. Since 2018, he has also worked with the Goethe-Institut China as a video editor and filmmaker.
His films have been shown at international festivals, including Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam, Zurich, Odense, and Milano Design Film Festival. He has taken part in residencies during the European Capital of Culture 2024—at PLATEAU BLO, a floating island project on Lake Traunsee; at Leopoldplatz Berlin, where he created a mobile kitchen exchanging soup for local stories; and in Tartu, Estonia, producing the documentary Pedals, Parts and People on cycling culture.
He has received several awards, including the Preis für Innovation & Experiment from Kulturfunke* Lübeck and the klimasoziale Stadt Linz prize.
City in Porn examines the intersection of urban spaces and pornographic representation, exploring how architecture and the city are shaped by and depicted within sexual media. Drawing from Paul B. Preciado’s Pornotopia, which analyzes Playboy’s creation of an “architecture of desire,” the project investigates how pornography imagines, constructs, and commodifies space. By analyzing visual and narrative tropes in pornographic media, it asks: How do mediated depictions of sex shape urban imaginaries? What ideologies about gender, power, and consumption are embedded in these spatial narratives?
This research employs a practice-based, interdisciplinary methodology combining critical theory, visual analysis, and artistic production. Through essay films, public installations, performative city walks, and interviews with sex workers, urbanists, and theorists, the project creates a dialogue between media, sexuality, and space. It draws on feminist porn practices (e.g., Paulita Pappel) and emerging Porn Studies (Madita Oeming) to map alternative spatial imaginaries rooted in consent, agency, and plurality.
The work situates pornography not only as cultural text but as spatial practice—one that informs how desire is constructed and lived in the city. Through reflexive documentation and sensory engagement, City in Porn explores how architecture and media co-produce new forms of visibility, intimacy, and control. It challenges dominant narratives and opens up speculative futures for more inclusive and critical urban imaginaries.
Ultimately, this project bridges artistic inquiry with urban theory to illuminate how space, sex, and media intersect, aiming to shift both disciplinary boundaries and public perceptions.