Empire 2020

Over the course of a warm night in Dubai, Invernomuto filmed the tallest building on earth for six and a half hours straight. The film shows little more than the sky’s luminance changing, guided by the lights that, in the buildings being gazed at, turn on and off as time goes by. This image portrays Burj Khalifa–a decoy built to attract everyone from everywhere. EMPIRE 2020 is, somehow, a postcard of a building that, in its configuration, is itself a postcard of that place and a late-capitalist paradigm, a highly defined image of a symbol of prestige and power of the elites of that territory. Invernomuto’s film, EMPIRE 2020, is a remake of Andy Warhol’s 1965 film EMPIRE. Warhol, with the help of John Palmer, Jonas Mekas and others, framed the top of the Empire State Building, from another building, and filmed it uninterruptedly, for six and a half hours. Both Warhol and now the Italian duo eventually slowed down their footage so the films would get to their final length of eight hours and five minutes. Among other things, these two buildings share the fact that they have been filmed at the time when they were considered the tallest buildings ever built. Both have become pivotal for the imagery one has of each of those cities where they were planted in. They function as symbols for both societies and times. Recently, at a talk held at MIT Architecture, named “Building and Bildung und Blackness”, Fred Moten drove over the homophonic similarities of these two words– Building and Bildung–to reflect on how architecture and projects can be seen as a form of self-picturing. 

This screening is part of SWS the second chapter of the film program TUTTAUNANOTTE, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, and unfolding in four chapters between November 1, 2025 and December 26, 2025, with the films of each chapter streaming for two weeks.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.