“Travelling, you realise that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name” Marco Polo to Kublai Khan (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities,p. 125)
Each place we visit may seem different and new, but how different are the fundamental elements of each city truly? Looking critically at Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’, can we view each place as essentially a variation on a singular model and do we see familiar elements everywhere we go?
In his novel Calvino invents fifty-five cities, and the narrator Marco Polo describes each place to the Emperor Kublai Khan. While he differentiates between the experiences in each city, Calvino also conveys the essential standardisation of the ‘city’ itself. In order to explore the relevance of this theory, we can apply it to Biblical tales and modern urban ideas. In practise, can we see the earliest civilisations in India as models for the cities of today?
To begin with let us consider the New Testament Book of Revelation, and John’s first vision of the city of Jerusalem. The golden city and its jewel like walls, described in the text were to influence several generations of church builders to design stained glass windows made of gem-like coloured glass and gilded decorations, seeking to recreate the impression of the heavenly city. While a church is not a city, this notion of the ideal heavenly city setting a standard for religious architecture provides a parallel for Calvino’s thesis. Building further on this we can draw a connection to the Old Testament story the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis 11:1-9. According to the Biblical story, the Lord created the Tower of Babel as an earthly city to reach the heavens, where all would speak one language. However, he decided to confuse his people and gave them all a different language and scattered them all over the face of the earth to build new cities. Here the original city set a precedent for all the cities of the world.
In modern and contemporary culture, the model city is categorised alternatively as a utopia or dystopia and the metropolis. While in the Bible, the city was ‘ideal’ and was viewed optimistically, these modern terms cast a more cynical light on the city and are possibly more realistic. Utopia is the opposite of the word dystopia and the possibility of a utopian city seems doubtful today. In the present day we incline ourselves more naturally to the word dystopia to describe current events and life experiences. In the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance, Old and New Testament tales of the ideal city and the strength of purpose in God’s creation created a ‘silver lining’ to the darker aspects of the lives of the pious and gave them something to believe in. However as exemplified by Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis in 1927, today, especially politically, urban life is seen as controlled by powerful ideologies and its inhabitants as disillusioned with utopian ideals.
Applying these two opposing concepts of the ideal city to India, we can think back to its earliest civilisation Harappa in the Bronze Age (3300-1300 BC). The cities of this time were highly sophisticated and technologically advanced, especially the city of Mohenjo-daro, where urban planning, efficient governments and hygiene were prioritised. If we consider this first city as a decisive model for the 4,000 cities in India today, we can use this as a possible concrete example for the ideal city. Let us consider some cities of India and how different yet similar these are. Going from the desert city of Jaisalmer in the North to the water surrounded Fort Kochi in the South, what parallels can we find? What core elements exist and are the only differences, our personal experiences?
In his novel, Calvino doesn’t argue that this singular city is an ideal one but that it is a model, which all cities are based on. It could nonetheless be interpreted that his singular model must be ‘ideal’ for it to be so influential. This exhibition will examine what the notion of an ideal city means for the artists of today and their audience. Can we feel optimistic that our urban environments are utopian or ‘heavenly’ places of the Bible, or pessimistic that they are dystopian metropolises controlled by ruling ideologies and the grim truths of city life?
Here as part of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, bringing artists from cities all over the world together, we can visually answer this important question: how can we understand the origins of the cities we experience?
Exhibition concept written for Gallery OED in Mattancherry, Kerala, India.
Mala Yamey 