Wilf Speller will focus on their recent master’s thesis Dream Homes: The Speculative Aesthetics of Luxury Real Estate Marketing (DAI, 2020). Speller’s thesis critically examines the contemporary forms and motifs of luxury real estate marketing as reflections of the modes of production typical to the commodity landscape from which they emerge. In particular it focuses on the CGI videos used for the sale of off-plan property. It argues that these speculative images do not only project a particular image of the world, but that the very mode of imaging used in their production reflects the technoaesthetics of the neoliberal ideology. Whilst the thesis is ostensibly concerned with architecture, it does not engage in form through an analysis of style typical to a history of architecture, nor through a phenomenological or affective understanding of space. Instead, it engages with form through a Marxist analysis of the commodity form as well as a politico-aesthetic understanding of ideology.

WILF SPELLER is a visual artist and filmmaker, born and based in London, UK. Their work emerges from a research and writing practice that reflects on future imaginaries and their representation. Of late, Wilf’s work primarily focuses on the ideological and aesthetic dogmas that shape the spatial politics of late capitalism and the anthropocene. Wilf has exhibited internationally in both galleries and festivals including the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, The Photographer's Gallery (London), HMKV (Dortmund), Broad Art Museum MSU (Michigan) and IMPAKT Festival (Utrecht). Wilf is a 2020 graduate of the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and holds an MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster (2014).

The event takes place as a part of the program “Get Real!”, a series of online discussions about housing policy and new forms of (co)existence curated by TOK in December 2020 -  June 2021 as a part of 5 season of it’s ongoing project “Critical Mass”. New season focuses on the emerging and complex issues of housing, real estate, urban development, contemporary and historical housing conditions in post-socialist and neoliberal contexts as well as pressing socio-political and environmental processes in megacities.