The collapsing metropolis: M-City and the fate of the Machine Civilization
© arcomai I “The collapsing metropolis” (alt text).
Mariusz Waras, known by the pseudonym M-City, is a Polish street artist, graphic designer, and illustrator born in 1978 in Gdynia. He is internationally renowned for his monumental works created using stencil techniques, depicting imaginary urban landscapes where architecture, machinery, and cityscapes merge. His pieces evoke industrial settings and visions of futuristic mechanics, giving rise to a powerful and recognizable visual narrative.
Waras completed his academic training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, graduating from the Department of Graphic Arts. After his studies, he embarked on an academic career: he teaches Painting and Street Art at the Academy of Arts in Szczecin, within the Department of Painting and New Media. He also teaches Street Art at the Department of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, returning as a lecturer to the institution where he was trained. Alongside his academic work, M-City is active in graphic design, illustration, and the creation of spatial installations and large-scale sculptures. His artistic production revolves around two main axes: on one hand, a playful aesthetic inspired by video games; on the other, a reflection on the city that invites critical analysis of contemporary society, with clear political undertones that reveal the deep connection between space and power. His body of work now includes over seven hundred murals around the world, visible in cities such as Warsaw, Gdańsk, Berlin, Paris, London, Prague, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bolzano, and in countries including Slovenia, Germany, Poland, Brazil, Spain, Thailand, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Australia, Serbia, Turkey, Indonesia, India, Finland, the United States, Tunisia, and many others.
© arcomai I “The collapsing metropolis” (alt text).
We visited one of M-City’s most emblematic works in Poland, located in Wrocław. The mural, created in 2008 as part of the international exhibition Out of Sth (“External Artists”), stands in front of the Arkady Gallery, at the intersection of Powstańców Śląskich and Nasypowa streets. Out of Sth was the first exhibition in Poland to present street art within a museum context, initiating a dialogue between urban art and contemporary gallery spaces. The artwork, completed only three years later due to an injury suffered by the artist, depicts a striking scene: locomotives and train cars plunge from a broken span bridge, swallowed by swirling waters. The catastrophe appears to stem from a technical failure rather than human error—or perhaps from a deliberate act by the machine itself, echoing the “intelligence” and spirit of self-determination that Futurist art, as theorized by Marinetti, attributed to mechanical entities. The message is powerful and timely: a reflection on modernity and its evolutionary stage, possibly its final one, in which the Civilization of the Machine seems to be heading toward its own collapse. In this scenario, nature rebels, erasing the progress imposed upon it against its essence. The image perfectly embodies M-City’s visual language, capable of transforming urban space into symbolic narrative. In this vision, the city becomes a tool for understanding our destiny — a mirror of the tensions between technology, society, and the environment.
© arcomai I “The collapsing metropolis” (alt text).