Invisible Cities

Calvino, I, 1997. Invisible Cities. Vintage

Invisible Cities is relevant to this project in the development of an understanding of landscape and in the exploration of recursion. In Invisible cities the place of Venice is told, a landscape described through oblique stories of other places. However, through the overlaying of metaphors and the helix of underlying mathematical structure the pattern of the essence Venice can be traced. The book is central to my thinking about the construction of what it means to describe the experience of a place, in the case of my project – a specific landscape, a tree.

Invisible Cities inspired the documentation of my travels in Venice (2002). Overlaid double exposures, flicking between red geraniums and chalky pink balconies, vistas of the heavily trafficked Grand canal and glimpses of quiet darkness in small laneway canals. Invisible cities describes Venice through stories and oblique views, and this photograph is part of a series that explored using a camera to overlay my own different stories and views of the landscape. The images double and repeat, the film is wound forward and then back, new images exposed over old images, the full story not appearing until the film is developed.

Own photograph of Venice (2002) Taken with a Holga on slide film

The imagery of doubling and recursion, of layering oblique stories to talk about the landscape informs this project. The resultant photographs explore ways of describing the traces left behind by connections, the transfer of memories to a place, then back onto further experiences, reflecting infinitely like a hall of mirrors. Like Calvino’s Venice, sometimes the specific landscape “is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind”, and sometimes it is everything that the story is about.

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