The Post Traumatic Urbanist is a body of work that interrogates architecture’s relationship with trauma and the saturation of media images. The work links Paul Virilio’s assertion that technology and in particular the speed and accelerative nature of the image has its own inherent violence, to Roger Luckhurst’s thesis on the intersection of trauma and photography. A constant exposure to this speed and acceleration through a multitude of ever more disruptive media platforms has its own traumatic imprint. Manley uses the built environment as a conduit to explore these ideas and to develop his own thesis that architecture has reasserted its place in our collective conscious as a potential space for violence. For Manley, The Post Traumatic Urbanist series operates as a form of clinical diagnosis and personal therapy, a decelerative eddy in the torrent of modernity.

Installation images by Docqment