-Cities & Reflections-
When I was reading invisible cities, I was particularly struck by two of the cities, Zaira and Tamara. What was so interesting about Zaira stems from the line, “A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past.” (p.10) Calvino explains that all aspects of the city’s existence can only truly be understood by unearthing what has happened there, “the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn.” Additionally, the city does not “tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets…” (p. 11) Here we have a city who exists only through its history, and the reflections of individuals, the personal anecdotes, the memories of pain, and the reflections of that one happiest day a member of the city has ever lived defines the bedroom, the back-alley, the bench in the park, and the chapel. The city therefore, by definition, is constantly absorbing these myriad memories and re-defining itself, just as a memory transforms itself throughout history. And what is more is that each measurement in Zaira acts a signifier for that memory, which is where I began to think of the City Tamara. In the city of Tamara, again, nothing truly appears as it is, but instead of being a city whose structure relies on past memory, it relies on symbols. When in Tamara, “the eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer’s house; scales, the grocer’s.” (p. 13) This city is a direct embodiment of what the city is all too literally, in a sense. It shows only the replication of something, and not that something itself. Everything is a distillation, a metaphor, trimmed of the ephemeral ‘excess’ that constitutes so many necessary elements of a city.
These cities were particularly embossed against the others in the book because they corresponded so well with an enduring photography project of mine titled ‘Reflections.’ In this project I find ways to re-represent my photographs, keeping the idea in mind that in order to understand them I need to reflect and understand why I was taking the photograph, what I felt like when I was taking the photograph, and how the photograph was important to me when I took it compared to how it is important to me later on. I chose two images in particular that really express each city. Zaira is represented by a photograph wherein I projected a slide onto a wall and composed a still life around and with the projected slide in an attempt to explain the memory of that picture more fully. I also changed the subject of the picture from being a picture of the ocean to being a picture of the memory of the ocean. This idea is wound through the city of Zaira fully in that the primary definition of the city is the memory of the city, not any constructions or existences therein, but the reflective constituents that encumber its every corner, and is “written in the corners of the streets…” When you visit Tamara, in addition to seeing only the mere metaphoric calculations of a city, you “are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.” Calvino wishes to express that by doing this, by posing the names, and recording the city as an itinerary or list of intersections, you do not ever fully visit the city. In an ironic display, my photograph ‘distillation,’ posits the same quality of reflection. The photograph is, by definition, a photograph of an entire hike I took by myself with my camera through the forest. I printed 6 of the pictures I took on the hike (again, these pictures were taken with an almost haphazard lack of understanding of what I was doing, wild, free, intuitive.) and pasted them to the 6 sides of a wooden cube. I then placed the wooden cube against a white background and photographed it there, floating, empty, no space at all, just a distillation of the hike itself. But the question that the photograph begs is the same one that Tamara begs, ‘Is this representation equivalent to the thing (city/ hike) itself? I would respond no, and Italo Calvino would respond, “you leave Tamara without ever having discovered it.”
These two cities work in opposition to collide at the crux of the overall meaning/ significance of the book, somewhere near the city center. In Invisible Cities, a point where this overall picture emerges is on page 86 where Marco Polo says, “Every Time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” In this, we can reason with the question I posed and use its answer to expand upon the representation of both Zaira and Tamara. If all these cities are ‘something’ about Venice, then they only represent a link in a chain of invisible cities, underneath, in and around every city. These discreet cities are each just one way of describing something about a city, any city. This is why Marco Polo can only “attempt” to describe Zaira, “Vainly,” and also why “you leave Tamara without having discovered it.” So, accordingly, the photographs that I have made rely on the fact that I was there to see the original thing. About my countless reflections and representations of the original subject (which become, in their own right, the subject of the image), no one would believe it a real place and time if it was not grounded or in reference to the original photograph. These Invisible cities, like my photographs, fissure and fray as tangents and reflective discourse, but indeed they must all be taken together to see that the cities Calvino describes are indeed fantasy, and rely on the conglomerate of their sum to make one realistic city. Or, conversely, without these separate intrusions on the invisible cities palpitating throughout the 'real' city, this 'real' city itself would not be whole or realistic to the degree in which the invisible cities make it.
cities.pptx