Posted at Sep 28/2009 08:03PM:
Zoe: ZORA Zoe Chaves
As I read Calvino's Invisible Cities, I was struck by the way in which Marco Polo swiftly conjures up each city; he begins his description and we are there, we are within city limits and being explicitly shown the most unique, urban, and beautiful facets of each metropolis. Polo's descriptions are so utterly comprehensive- here he speaks of spatial relationships, there he's detailing brilliant and dizzying architecture, and then he has moved on to "the order by which the copper clock follows the barber's striped awning...the statue of the hermit and the lion," and other such features usually written off as minuta. The traveler starts his account in the midst of the urban and feels his way out, taking us with him as he visits (revisits?) the contours of each fantastical city, the contours of design, memory, desire, symbolism, visibility, mortality. And then, once he's hit or made some sort of limit, Marco Polo stops. He gives us and Khan these beautiful renderings of each urban space and then dives into a conclusion, leaving his cities hanging by invisible threads, suspended on transparent podiums. He does not chain each city to a surrounding agricultural region; he does not anchor them down to larger religious traditions or existing patterns of sociability. This is not to say that there are not many elements of history, humanity, and symbolism in the work; I just think that they are not presented in a way that ties each city down to a larger global fabric. I think that this is a really radical way to think about cities. I wanted to explore this idea, and found the perfect invisible city through which to do so: Zora (detailed in Cities & Memory 4). Polo recalls that Zora is not impressive in any traditional sense of the word; it only stays in the "memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, though nothing in them possesses a special beauty or rarity." Zora is only meaningful when viewed and held as a pattern, a collection of contrasts and spatial leaps that are truly memorable. I wanted to recreate this oddly static city and try to set it into some of the contexts we've spoken of in class: the social, the rural, the religious. I wanted to try to tether one of Calvino's cities down. To accomplish this, I drew a basic representation of Zora and photographed that image in three settings which I hope are illustrative of social systems, religion, and the rural. Each link on this page represents one of those three images, and I also included a scanned copy of my drawing of Zora just for reference.
Large versions of images:
cityandsocial.JPG
cityandreligion.JPG
cityandtherural.JPG
citydrawing.jpg
