Impostor Cities

The world we live in is the global generic city we experience together onscreen. Impostor Cities is about architectural identity and faking it, exploring the ways Canada’s buildings and cities double as other places in film and television. Through clips, video interviews, and green-screen opportunities, this multimedia project is a playful critique of cultural self-presentation, examining movies as powerful sites of architectural experience, expression, and authenticity.

Conceptualized and curated by Thomas Balaban, David Theodore, and Jennifer Thorogood, Impostor Cities was initially commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts for the 2020 Canadian Pavilion at the International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition is now being fully realized for the first time in a site-specific composition for MOCA Toronto.

Impostor filming locations are a key part of Hollywood North, Canada’s multibillion-dollar film industry. Financial incentives, skilled crews, and well-equipped studios attract international productions that refashion our photogenic yet generic cities as elsewhere. These movies show Canada’s cities as shape-shifters, where the ability to change is framed as a cultural strength rather than a weakness. A counterproposition to the belief that architecture is founded in geography, climate, and history, Impostor Cities suggests new possibilities for architecture’s transformative capacities.

As the viewer enters the exhibition on Floor 3 at MOCA, a unique, immersive installation provides an environment for real-time interaction. Green-screen and chroma-key effects shift visitors into movie-mode, preparing them to experience architecture through fictional cinematic worlds. The bright green walls provide the background for digital processing, and special effects play out in rotoscoped panoramic projections that allow visitors to appear in dreamlike landscapes featuring Canadian architecture.

At the heart of the exhibition lies The Screening Room. Conceived as an audiovisual installation, a series of screens immerse visitors in film-famous modernist architecture, historic neighbourhoods, and quotidian cityscapes from St. John’s to Victoria. The display comprises clips from over 3,000 films and television shows shot in Canada—from the backdrop for action heroes in X-Men and Pacific Rim, to the dramatic settings of Brokeback Mountain and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as the cosmic topography of Battlestar Galactica. Making palpable the ways that filmmakers re-use buildings and landscapes across an array of films, this supercut highlights national icons such as Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, alongside beloved neighbourhood locales including The Lakeview Restaurant in Toronto.

Within this multifaceted exhibition and available online is a component titled The Interviews, which presents discussions with Canadian architects, film directors, set designers, and other industry insiders, including David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Sook-Yin Lee, and Guy Maddin. Each of these filmmakers exposes the existence of a cinematic world with a distinct reality, implying a belief in a fictional place beyond the historical facts that characterize the city. And who’s to say that’s not what our cities are actually about?

Impostor Cities celebrates the protean metropolises and buildings that pose as cinematic doubles, powerfully challenging visitors to think about authenticity at a moment when the blurring of fact and fiction onscreen is particularly significant. Exploring new directions for architecture, Impostor Cities brings us together in a shared cityscape—a place that most have not physically visited, but which exists in the minds of moviegoers around the world, constructed through patchwork impressions of Canada’s architecture and landscapes.

Alongside the exhibition at MOCA, the project continues to have an outlet online at https://impostorcities.com/

Curated by Thomas Balaban, David Theodore, Jennifer Thorogood

Presented by MOCA Toronto