Iván Sikic
After the corporate and financial centres of Miami started moving away from Downtown Miami and towards emerging financial centers in the city like Coral Gables & Brickell towards the end of the 1990’s, the heart of the city began to slowly shut down, almost to the point of oblivion.
As a consequence, what used to be streets filled with shops and businesses of all sizes, have now turned into a tropical ghost town of sorts, where buildings remain empty, and have become prey to gentrification, after the vast majority of the district was acquired by a real estate group willing to wait out this ‘slow period’, hoping to reap the rewards of eventually high rents, brought in by a younger generation of professionals.
Within this context, Iván Sikic’s series TOPPLED, photographed between February & March 2021, aims to capture the facades of those once bustling shops, but that are now hidden behind gates that were once closed never to be opened up again, and left in a state of decay that, as with TOPPLE (Sikic, 2020), the viewer is once again taken to question what would be in store in an apocalyptic society where the only traces of humanity are those of the places we used to visit for the sake of transacting.