Invisible Cities Pt 2

I spent the last post describing the intentions behind this piece I did for the minor project during my illustration degree's final year. I guess the last post was pretty vague as to what the piece actually looked like, but these next few images should settle that. 

I have no idea of what to call the thing I created - sculpture? installation? 3d illustration? monument? Whatever it turned out to be, I started work on it by sketching out a few ideas based on the images which I posted previously. I knew that I wanted it to have some kind of holy aura, to contain a secluded interior using curtains and to have this relic-like quality without it looking like a tourist souvenir. So I created this model out of cardboard and then proceeded to have a chat with my pap who suggested ideas of how best to build the structure without having it collapse during the project's hand-in. My father is one of those men who can build anything from anything and can single-handedly repair a house and while I'm not half as resourceful, I do owe much to him. 

During all of this time I had been hoarding bits of wood from the streets - scrap planks, abandoned bits of furniture in skips, knobs and balusters and banisters and anything that looked remotely like a dome or a tower, and much more. Earlier on I had made the decision to build this thing out of scrap wood, mostly out of pure necessity since I barely had any cash to pay the bills let alone buy wood to build a timeless relic. At the end I think that this worked in favour of the piece's final visual feel since I felt that the various different wooden elements accentuated the idea of drawing from different cultures to create a unified whole. The only money spent was on the varnishes, a couple of couch covers from a charity shop that my friend Lisa turned into curtains, a cheap TK Maxx candle holder and aluminium salad bowl for the dome and some other technical bits and pieces. Most of the construction took place at my uni's 3D workshop and later at home. 

 (model)

After construction came the decoration bit of the project. This involved varnishing, hand painting a quotation from Invisible Cities onto the structure, applying patterns to the floating city base and of course decorating all of the city's buildings. I based the quotation's typeface on what I thought might look like late-19th century British imperial lettering which I'd seen whilst working in museums in Malta (especially the Maritime Museum). The inverted star-shaped podium on which I built my floating city drew inspiration once again vaguely from the Middle East. The buildings of the city itself are representations of various global and imagined architectural styles - from Central European churches to Arabic minarets and so on. I tried as much as possible to maintain the geographical sequence of the Silk Route within the planning of my tiny city. The interior contains a sprinkling of exotic spices to evoke the smell of a market along the Silk Route and is illuminated by a light which I like to think of as being moonlight. 

 

This project was almost unlike anything I'd done before. It was a highly passion-driven venture of which I doubt I'd have the opportunity to repeat. I've recently had some ideas for it and I'll post any related plans on this blog (hopefully) in the future. Finally, here are some images of the final piece to finish off this post. Thanks for reading!

Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities is a book by Italo Calvino. I remember being referred to it by way of a Swoon interview a few years back who mentioned it as being one of her favourite books. Anything with a title like 'Invisible Cities' just had to be worth reading, so after buying it it immediately became one of my favourites too. The vocabulary was lush, the rhythms dreamy and the descriptions so fantastic and I remember thinking to myself that I should definitely do some project related to this great book in the future. 

Around a year ago I was just starting my final year in Illustration at UCA Maidstone and was in the process of coming up with a few proposals for my minor project. I thought it would great to return to Invisible Cities, yet my vision for the final product only went as far as mere paint on paper. A couple of months and eye-opening tutorials later I would be hacking away at and sticking together bits of found wood at the uni's 3D workshop.

At some point during those two months the idea of doing a project about Invisible Cities had changed slightly to becoming a project about Invisible Cities and the book on which it is based - Marco Polo's 13th century travels. This actually gave the project a whole new spin due to the fact that now the project was based in Asia and had some form of place in time, as opposed to the timeless poetry of Invisible Cities. The mythical Silk Road (roughly the road Marco Polo describes) now also played a much bigger role in the project and as I'm very attracted to the idea of cultural mutation and ethnographic mixing, I began to view the Silk Road as this extensive cultural gamut - a trail in which one could see, by travelling it, a gradient of languages (sounds), folklore (sights), food (smells) and architecture (spaces) mutating into one another from Europe all the way to China and back. I saw the cities described in Invisible Cities as the cities which Marco Polo had seen during his journey along the Silk Route. That, or cities which he had actually never seen, but rather had heard about through a fellow silk route traveller in a language which he could not fully comprehend and had therefore left enough space for imagination to take root. These fantastical cities could also be a fabulous case of lost in translation during Marco Polo and the Kublai Khan's many dialogues in a made-up language throughout the book.

Even though it is never explicitly mentioned in either book, Russia and its central Asian ex-communist satellite countries quickly became very involved in the project. Central to this involvement was early 1900s Russian colour photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii whose works I find endlessly fascinating. The Russian onion dome too was a major influence on the project. I also always loved (in ways in which Edward Said might not have approved) these late 19th century/early 20th century monochrome ethnographic photographs which always seem to look so weirdly other-worldly. All of this and much more informed the visual direction of the project.

 

 (last 2 images by Prokudin-Gorskii - more on him another time)

This project acted as a sort of culmination of lots of experiences and interests: places I'd been to, ancient scripts, old maps, migration, melting pots etc. I remember for example thinking of Segovia, this magical city nestled in the mountains just north of Madrid, as having a skyline which I wanted my project to somehow possess. But above all, the place which was always at the back of my mind all throughout the project is Valletta, the capital of Malta and in a way our own little cultural melting pot. A few years away from Malta have allowed me to view my motherland somewhat objectively and I guess some of that came through in this project. For example, the shape of the structure itself was very much influenced by the six-sided turrets found along the Valletta (and the rest of the port area's) fortifications called Gardjoli. 

 

Segovia

 

a Maltese gardjola

 

Valletta

One last theme that I toyed around with throughout Invisible Cities was this idea of creating something magical, otherworldly and rare.. notions which I, writing from a desk on a laptop connected to the internet and downloading ridiculous amounts of readily available-but-previously-obscure music in the middle of London, feel are becoming increasingly hard to come by in this day and age. Perhaps that's why my geographical focus throughout this project (regardless of whether it shows through or not) was the remote steppe of Central Asian and not neon-lit Japan, green Thai curry Thailand or let's get spiritual India (places which until recently seemed worlds away). I wanted to capture that feeling you sometimes get when discovering that special thing you were always searching for when trawling through some musty old antique shop.. that thing and that space which although enjoyed by many belongs only to you.

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Thanks for making it this far!

In the next post i'll be posting some making-of images and ones of the final construction. 

(On to the second part)