In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo conjures wondrous cities he has visited for Kublai Khan's imagination to feed on. The following pieces seek to translate these invisible cities as literally as possible, by taking a sliver of Calvino's prose and weaving it into imagery as vivid and multi-faceted as the invisible cities themselves.
Photography, digital illustration, 2008
CLARICE
"Clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed,...any yet, almost nothing was lost of Clarice's former splendor...The days of poverty were followed by more joyous times: a sumptous butterfly-Clarice emerged from the beggared chrysalis-Clarice."
CLARICE
"In its centuries of decadence, emptied by plaques,...survivors grabbed everything that could be taken from where it was and put it in another place to serve a different use: in marble funerary urns they planted basil...before they were filled with dead bones."
CHLOE
"A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities. The people who move through the streets are all strangers...a blind man with a cheetah on a leash, a courtesan with an ostrich-plume fan, an ephebe, a Fat Woman...at each encounter they imagine a thousand things about one another,...surprises, carresses, bites."
