I could call it Dianora, Elida, Serafina or Euridice. After all, its name remains in the mind of those travellers who dare to seek it merely for the time needed to try to reach its gates; a name already forgotten by the time whoever finds it starts visiting it. It is one of the few cities that Marco Polo didn’t explore; to Kublai Khan he was unable to describe its snow-white towers that seem to have just flowed from an architect’s design; nor its buildings with their clean, linear structure. Of its interior one can say nothing: neither what it hides, nor what it protects.
An evanescent, deceptive city that bewitches strangers with its ambiguity and captures them in its invisible net. A city that wanted to challenge the heavens with its heights, but then, through affectation or gratification, decided to fuse with them: the white of its surfaces became that of the sun, the grey of its lines that of the clouds.
Whoever stops to look at its windows and façades, essential lines and celestial buildings loses themselves in trying to understand where thought ends and reality commences. The difference is so subtle that its visitors, misled by its fragile demeanour, forget that thought generates shapes so strong that they ensnare the essence of the one who creates them as much as the essence of whoever observes them. As a result they find themselves as prisoners, wandering in a suspended world, believing they have dreamed what they have in fact experienced.
Marco Polo was unable to tell Kublai Khan the story of Aletheia – yes; perhaps this is its name – because even he kept his distance. But had he even dared to visit it, he would have been unable to describe it, because his mind would have remained trapped in the white grain of its incomprehensibility.
In 1972 Italo Calvino wrote "Invisible Cities", a complex and multifaceted book, halfway between a collection of poetry and a series of tales. His work is a homage to the city and a study of the relationship that men establish with it.
At the same time, his cities are both real and imaginary, abstractions of urban reality, of those agglomerations that we have thought of creating in our image and that have ended up with the moulding of the image we have of ourselves. Zenobia is one of the Thin Cities, Maurilia is a city of memory, Isaura is the city of a thousand wells and Octavia the city-web.
Observing what we envisage depends on us, a moment arrives in which we discover an inescapable necessity: the creature has become creator. At that moment we realise that the city and our imagination follow the same road; that in reality, that which seems extraneous to us is guiding our thoughts.
In my work I have started from images that, right from the beginning, gave me the idea of something different to that which they wanted to show: overlays of skyscrapers that seemed sculptures; reflections in which space took on new forms; decorative elements that blended with abstract art. When I lingered over this series of shots, I noticed that they seemed much more designs than photographs – designed by an architect; blueprints on paper. At that moment I saw another city come to life, different to that which I had photographed; a city that appeared fragile and pure in its candour and order, but in reality, concealed a much darker and more complex character.
From a city in flesh and bone it had transformed into thought; in front of my eyes it had become a story, one of Calvino’s imaginary cities. It appeared as a symbol of how much more ambiguous and fleeting the truth can be in our lives; that "aletheia" that many – philosophers, alchemists, scientists and ordinary people – have ceaselessly pursued.
Calvino never told the story of Aletheia, but I wish he had, because that was the city I was seeing.
I myself have therefore tried to recount its secrets, hoping not to have wronged one of the last century’s most visionary writers.
Aletheia will very probably be the first of "my" invisible cities, those that I encounter when, like a flâneuse, I visit the streets of a familiar or unknown metropolis, or when I pay more attention to the streets that follow my thoughts.
My work also aims to be a homage to the city, that structure of which "you take delight not in the seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours".