Cities and Skies

Cities and Skies uses excerpts from Invisible Cities, a novel by Italo Calvino, © 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore. Calvino's book presents descriptions of 55 imaginary cities as told to Kublai Khan by the explorer Marco Polo. For this piece, I've worked with the five cities in the 'Cities and and the sky' sections of Calvino's book - Eudoxia, Beersheba, Thekla, Perinthia and Andria. Lauren Winges created the original drawings, which were converted to digital files for laser etching onto cast acrylic pages. A series of threads connects the outside front cover through each page to the outside back cover; each side of the rigid, transparent pages features one of Lauren's drawings and includes the name of the city that inspired the drawings. The full text of the five chapters used as the basis for the project is printed on a scroll that is mounted in its own compartment in the box the book is housed in.