Invisible cities italo calvino exerpt9/11/2023 Therefore, although these photographs are revealing of the city’s true life, they also emerge as a constant reminder of our inability to ever fully perceive it. Bodies and faces, ruins and statues, urban and sea scapes, skies and shadows, buildings and wall graffiti, they all become elements of a language that is ultimately deceitful. Athens is being photographed and thus deciphered, but, at the same time, it is getting yet more evasive, revealing its elusiveness in front of our eyes. All the photographs have captured and reveal ‘corners’ and moments of hidden meaning in the city of Athens. However, here the text is treated as a sort of palimpsest: sometimes a few words and/or phrases are deliberately omitted and thus new meaning is generated to harmonise with the Athenian micro-cities newly emerging through his photographs. His photographs are accompanied by extracts from Calvino’s corresponding awe-inspiring, poetic descriptions of the 55 imaginary cities. every aspect on which Drolapas focuses hints at a connection with the 55 model cites depicted by Calvino. The ancient city which allures the tourists and the decadent city of abandoned immigrants, the city that bears the hideous face of crisis and the desperation of loneliness, the city of fake glitter and fragile confidence, the hidden city of the future with its clay feet, the city with the facade of hope that is given to those without hope, etc. The result of this journey is an in-depth reflection upon the city of Athens, its life and its infinite facets. And as in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, there could be multiple potential courses along this projected spiral. At the same time he also ‘travels’ along the course of a hypothetical Fibonacci spiral as it is projected upon the wider area of the city of Athens, using the Acropolis hill as the starting point for his photographic journey. Drolapas closely follows the sequence of Calvino’s 55 model cities and the categories that these fall into. The structure of the book is such that it allows multiple readings furthermore, it invokes the Fibonacci sequence, that is, a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The main theme of Invisible Cities revolves around cities, their nature, civilization, and ultimately around the view of the world as ‘a system of systems’. The project follows the structure of Calvino’s masterpiece: 55 chapters include the descriptions of an equal number of cities under 11 different titles (thematic units) each repeated 5 times. In this case, dreams and desires are represented on top and fear is represented underground.Anargyros Drolapas’ photographic project, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, constitutes a study of the city of Athens, a meditation on its multifaceted and complex character. The city on top is a happy city, with kites and elevated streets, while down below there is a mining city, with no light and where you have to work all day long and are trapped. So, I represented a city on top of another city. Calvino talks about how you think you are happy living inside her but you really aren’t – about that duality. Puente continues: "I could tell you about how I decided to make Anastasia, which is part of the chapter Cities and Desire. There is something magical about people living close together." The more hectic a city is, the more interesting for me. One of the things that deeply interests me is the powerful exchange of knowledge that happens in cities and the multiple and diverse sociocultural interchange we witness. "I am interested in all of them, tiny, huge, historic, creative, problematic or cosmopolitan every single one has something worth admiring. In an interview with Kindle, Puente has stated how she finds cities "absolutely amazing," and even more so about metropolises and megalopolises. According to Puente, "each illustration has a conceptual process, some of which take more time than others." Usually "I research, think, and ideate over each city for three weeks before making sketches." The final drawings and cut-outs take around a week to produce. Invisible Cities, which imagines fictional conversations between the (real-life) Venetian explorer Marco Polo and the aged Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, has been instrumental in framing approaches to urban discourse and the form of the city. This latest series of mixed media collages, drawn mainly using ink on paper, brings together another sequence of imagined places – each referencing a city imagined in the book. Her initial collection, which ArchDaily published in 2016, traced Cities and Memories. Lima-based architect Karina Puente has a personal project: to illustrate each and every "invisible" city from Italo Calvino's 1972 novel.
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