Sleeping Beauties

Alexandre Humbert creates an immersive film of the speculative Sleeping Beauties tour entertainment resort inside the Disney-like Burj Al Babas housing development. Begun in 2014, Burj Al Babas was designed to attract wealthy golf tourists to Mudurnu in Turkey. But after five years the project was abandoned, resulting in a huge waste of finances and materials and hundreds of unsold houses that litter the landscape. Sleeping Beauties turns this ghost town into a resort that could generate a new source of income for a UNESCO World Heritage region. In Humbert's vision, visitors pay €10 to walk around and photograph the 732 three-storey royal villas, inventing their own fables to fill the empty rooms. Sleeping Beauties premiered as part of GeoDesign: Junk exhibition during Dutch Design Week 2019