Cartography of the Ephemeral
“The city is not a place, but a flow”
The city is not presented through its buildings or monuments, but through the successive presences that inhabit and vanish from it; it is constructed by memory (drawing on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities).
The city’s identity is formed by an accumulation of lives, gestures, and anonymous trajectories. Photography becomes a reflection on time and the urban experience.
In a city, traces outlast individuals, turning the urban landscape into a silent archive of memories and passages. What matters is not merely what is visible, but the invisible stories that remain deposited upon these places (drawing on Calvino’s fantastic city of Tamara).
(from my project ‘Parallel Worlds: A Poetics Through Photographic Polyptychs’)
Reminds me of the six screen digital painting by TeamLab – The World of Inevitable Change (2022) When I saw it, it was a thriving traditional Japanese village.The people in the artwork responded when a viewer touched them. If the interaction was limited, they would return to their daily lives. If the interaction continued, fights and unrest would set in. This would spread until eventually the town would be engulfed in flames, and burn to the ground. The village was alive and well when I saw it. It continued thriving until audience intervention caused a war, In February 2026, the society collapsed and remains destroyed gradually returning to nature. (Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero, Valencia.
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