Cities and Eyes

Cities and Eyes uses excerpts from Invisible Cities, a novel by Italo Calvino, © 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore. I developed this work for Constellation Studio's 2016 exhibit Metropolis and Invisible Cities. Calvino's book presents descriptions of 55 imaginary cities as told to Kublai Khan by the explorer Marco Polo. I chose to work with the five cities in the Cities and Eyes sections of Calvino's book - Valrada, Zemrude, Baucis, Phyllis and Moriana. Lauren Winges created the original drawings, which were converted to digital files for laseretching 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.