Crossing the ImagiNation
The Connections between one element of the story and another are not always obvious, the object could have various meaning, but what enhanced every event was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words. – Italo Calvino
Project details
- Year
- 2020
- Programme
- animation
- Practices
- Autonomous
- Minor
- Critical Studies
Crossing the ImagiNation explores cities and architecture that border between the mind and reality. It is a journey of the imagination to escape the invisible chains of nationalism and ideology. This film is a poetic and experimental adaptation of my visual research for my graduation project about architecture and ideology.
For my graduation I did research in my personal fascinations: cartography and architecture. Both forms of arts are an interesting mixture of science and aesthetics with a delicate balans. Cartography and architecture also function as a form of narrative for ideology.
For my project I did research in nationalism and ideology. Both subjects play a part in my film Crossing the ImagiNation, which is about traveling to overcome these restrains and are visualised by cartography and architecture in different shapes and forms. Nationalism is part of the human imagination. It unites different communities based on their traditions, culture, language, religion and other social structures. Even though different groups of people are united in a geographical area, they may have no other real connection to each other. Therefor nationalism can be considered as a false consciousness and one single ruling community propagates this idea through cultural institutions. As a result, the ideology of this small dominant group of people is accepted as the norm and guarding the status quo of the people in power. By traveling you can escape these invisible chains and look at the world from a different perspective and you can identify your own place in the world better.
The voice-over is based on Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
You can watch the film here:
You can read the voice-over transcript here:
The listener retains only the words they are expecting…
A traveler’s past changes according to the route has been followed
Traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings, it becomes an empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest
It makes you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling
The sunlit face of the land is a treacherous appeal to lurking death, to hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart
Contemplating these essential landscapes, reflecting on the invisible order that sustains cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons, and then how they sadden and fall in ruins.
I take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question.
Are cities the work of the mind or of chance?
Do I advance always with my head turned back? Or is what I see always behind me?
The more I am lost in unfamiliar spaces of distant cities
The more I can understand the other cities that have been crossed to arrive here
These images of my memories
Once they are fixed in words, are erased
By speaking of it, I am already losing it, little by little
I have the sense that as I press on more is revealed
Penetrating deeper and deeper into a heart of darkness
I retrace the stages of my journey
My past changes according to the route that has been followed
Arriving at each new city, I find a past that was unknown before
Does my journey take place only in the past?
Or are these journeys to relive my past?
The foreignness of what I no longer am or no longer possess lies in wait for me in foreign, unpossessed places
By now from that real or hypothetical past. I am excluded; I cannot stop; I must go to another city. Where another of my pasts awaits or something perhaps that had been a possible future of mine and is now someone else’s present.
These futures not achieved are only branches of the past
Dead branches…
Are these journeys to recover my future?
Traveling, I realized that differences are lost
Each city takes to resemble all cities
Places exchange their form, order, distances
The catalogue of forms is endless
Until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born
When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begin
We live in the flicker But darkness was here yesterday
The imagination of the living is not something that will be
It is what is already here
For we live, as we dream
Alone…