#Invisible cities italo calvino exerpt skin#

If you ask, ‘Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?’ the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, ‘So that its destruction cannot begin.’ And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, ‘Not only the city.’ “Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. Notes on Looking for Thekla in Brussels: Kieran Toms (Guide, Cohort 05) Boris Feron (C4), Pepijn Kennis (C5), Mashiat Murtaza (C9), Sloane Pretto (C10).Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.” My traveling companions, on the other hand, swear they saw only one dirigible hovering among the city’s spires, only one tattoo artist arranging needles and inks and pierced patterns on his bench, only one fat woman fanning herself on a train’s platform.

#Invisible cities italo calvino exerpt skin#

“I too am returning from Zirma: my memory includes dirigibles flying in all directions, at window level streets of shops where tattoos are drawn on sailors’ skin underground trains crammed with obese women suffering from the humidity. The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. Actually many of the blind men who tap their canes on Zirma’s cobblestones are black in every skyscraper there is someone going mad all lunatics spend hours on cornices there is no puma that some girl does not raise, as a whim. “Travelers return from the city of Zirma with distinct memories: a blind black man shouting in the crowd, a lunatic teetering on a skyscraper’s cornice, a girl walking with a puma on a leash. Eva Esnerova (Guide, Cohort 07), Ognjen Sobat (C6), Marcus Stevenson (C10), Francesa Spigarolo (C10), Serafina van Godtsenhoven (C10).

If you have not done so already, or if it has been a while since the last time, we hope you will give this incredible book a read and enjoy discovering the visible and invisible wonders of joint human endeavors in all cities of the world. You will find the name of each group (taken from its Calvino city), a list of group members, an excerpt from Calvino’s text, and photos and audio clips from the group’s exploration. The results of the first five out of ten groups are presented below as the official closing of the 2017 September Salon. Each group was asked to produce a handful of photos and audio recordings explaining their thought process. As a city that defies easy identifications, Brussels is an ideal site for urban exploration and the discovery of the fantastic, the impossible, and the hidden-in-plain-view.ĤCITIES students and alumni who participated in this game were organized into small groups that mixed members from different cohorts, given one of Calvino’s short texts from Invisible Cities, paired with an alumni guide, and sent out into the city to get to know Brussels all over again. Our starting point was the perspective that there is no such thing as “the city” or even “Brussels”, as each city contains a multitude of cities, a thousand different Brussels exist in the same place at the same time, and all of these are built on thousands of other Brussels both real and imagined.

This year’s September Salon was inspired by Italo Calvino’s classic text Invisible Cities and the excellent related projects of zURBS, a social-artistic urban laboratory co-founded by two 4CITIES alumni. The amazing ladies of zURBS were working in Copenhagen during the September Salon and thus unable to attend, but we tried to capture a bit of their spirit by connecting the ideas developed in 4CITIES theses with post-graduation projects and, broadly, urban exploration & discovery ( Field Notes will feature the September Salon presentations of alumni Anja Petrovic from Cohort 06 and Predrag Milic & Viktor Hildebrandt from Cohort 07 in an upcoming article). The following article is part one of a two part series. However, each year we try to use the energy of such a strong presence of 4Citizens to do something more – to create a setting in which we can learn from each other, invite lecturers with expertise on critical urban issues, or take a look at our own urban explorations from a different angle.

This has been the essence of our September Salon. For the past three years, on the penultimate weekend of September, 4CITIES alumni have travelled from all over the world to join the new graduates and first year students for a celebratory weekend of sharing beer, fries, and stories in Brussels.