Post Motor City S is an artistic research project that began in Motor City Stuttgart in 2017. With 299,937 registered cars (Federal Motor Transport Authority, status 1 January 2024), the city stands for the omnipresence of technological progress, the automotive control of public space, and an extensive industrial infrastructure.

The project explores this multi-layered narrative of the glittering successes of automobile production, accidents, urban planning illusions, and the fragile urban structures of a city that subordinated everything to the car and now must reinvent itself in the face of climate change.

At its core lies the radical thesis that automobiles are not merely objects, but non-human actors that shape and transform industries, cities and societies. Drawing on the theories of New Materialism as formulated by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze, Post Motor City S tells the story of a network of matter, technology and bodies that is constantly changing and recomposing itself.

During the pandemic lockdown, the project engaged with the theme of car-free roads, culminating in an AI-generated video that was shown in a solo exhibition in 2022.

The current works build on this exhibition and deepen the critical examination of F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909), whose euphoric demands for speed, war and patriotism now sound like a warning echo. These entrenched ideals are countered by personal memories of industrial culture, vulnerability, invisible labour and the crash. The collected car parts from Stuttgart’s crashed vehicles dream of a post-futuristic future against the backdrop of a changing modernity.

The solo exhibition Post Motor City S was open to the public from 04.11.2022 to 12.11.2022 at Galerie Oberwelt e.V., Reinsburgstrasse 93, 70197 Stuttgart, Germany. Additional works were later featured in the group exhibition Hyper-/Un-/Sur-Real at Eberhardstr. 28, 70173 Stuttgart, from 03.10.2025 to 29.10.2025.

Credits Post Motor City S 2025

Artist: MFU
Curator: Jan Nicola Angermann
Photography (Street Views): Anthony Wahl
Lighting: Roland Battroff
Production Support: Florian Siegert
Prints: Printpiloten GmbH
Foil: Folien Express Stuttgart
Special Thanks: Michael Widmayer, Lutz Unger,
Akademie Schloss Solitude

Credits Post Motor City S 2022

Artist: MFU
Curator: Peter Haury (Oberwelt e.V.)
Technical Support: Volker Menke, Jan Hoydem
Production Support: Hanna Araujo Ulmer, Hans-Peter Lutsch, Florian Siegert, Marc Olbrich (Oberwelt e.V.), Thomas Ulm (Oberwelt e.V.)
Prints: Paul Stefan Jäckel (Folien-Box Stuttgart)
Special Thanks: Oberwelt e.V., Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, 1a Autoservice Karl Schellhorn GmbH

Credits Motor City S 2021

Researcher/Writer/Artist: MFU
Technical Support: Lennart Unger, Jan Hoydem M.A., Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Volker Menke, Etienne Ninkov
Consultants: Hans-Peter Lutsch, Thomas Cappellaro M.A., Jasper Zehetgruber, Philipp Schell M.A., Lutz Unger, Simon Meienberg
Proofreading: Martha Bolnyh, Jasper Zehetgruber
Graphic-Design: Sophie Kraft, Jakob Mayer
Print: Muellerprints. Digitaldruck Stuttgart
Special Thanks: Martina Unger, Lutz Unger, Prognos AG