collages for italo calvino’s invisible cities

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a novel appreciated by many, but to the architect, is often regarded as poetic fantasy grounded in tasteful hints of principles of space, layout, infrastructure, and anthropomorphic notions. In the novel, Marco Polo recounts to Kublai Khan the “cities” he has seen on his expeditions, unpackaging beautiful descriptions of each place’s true nature.

In an attempt to visualize Khan’s imaginations by distilling Polo’s words, a collection of collages have been produced, while the idea to rearrange Calvino’s own words into much shortened, but potent poems aim to communicate the true nature of each city typology. Thus, a dialogue begins to exist between Polo’s prose and Khan’s visualizations; between the poetic summaries and their corresponding visual projections.

Cities and desire

“my eyes returned to contemplate, your desires waken all at once and surround you, and you believe you are enjoying when you are only its slave,

each receives its form from the desert it opposes, not because they are equally real, but because all are only assumptions,

what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer, this ugly city, this trap”

cities and the dead

“the hypocrite, the confidant, the astrologer, tyrant, benefactor, messenger, soldier, parasite, prostitute, father, daughter, servant, the participants die one by one until all the roles have been reassigned,

you reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living, and the mind refuses to accept more faces, and to make the leap from life to death less abrupt, all are carried down to continue their former activities”

cities and memory

“they have once before lived an evening identical to this, desires are already memories, the city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past,

marked in turn with scratches, this city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, but in order to be more easily remembered, has languished, disintegrated, disappeared,

a certain lost grace, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was”