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“If it’s your heart to talk about the city, that’s why,
that the increasing annoyance of life in it gives emergence to need
questions about what it is, what the city should be for us”
Italo Calvino
Every trip, I take the same book. From city to city, from past to history, from 1 communicative to another, beginning fresh perspectives. In each of the cities, I read respective stories that point to not the facts that I could read in the guide, but the value present here and now, and at the same time everywhere and always. And although I am not a individual who is fond of meditation, it is in a way her unspeakable echoes are changing in the cities that Marko Polo tells Kubłaj-chan. That's where the extraordinary small Italo Calvino book comes in. Invisible Cities. Each of them is materialized for a minute before the eyes of the readers; each carries its own message connecting the city with life, with man, with seemingly only a hermetic narrative, yet available to anyone who only takes a step to find it. Fifty-five cities—a city of a 1000 wells, many religions, a city of silver domes, it is full of work, and it is deceptive, promising more than it can give us; there are cities of signs, memory, desires, exchange; cities seen from the side of the sea and desert; cities found and hidden, cities of the surviving and dead, cities suspended in history, firmly embedded in their own unique identity. Cities of reception and rejection. Cities... like people. Like us.
Because the cities Calvino tells are about us, about people. About our pains, our sorrows, our needs, our stubbornness; about the values we profess, but besides about those we keep completely meaningless; they are about love, longings, desires, confusion, certainty, fears. They are about the diversity of thinking, the request for seeing and knowing more, about keeping secrets and going out into the open. They're about organizing life all day. About reaching for the unknown, about breaking the walls. Calvin's cities seem magical, distant, unexplored, yet familiar, ordinary. They are stories of us, but besides more widely, of cities imagined, built out of needs or for needs; sorrowful to expectations or necessity. Cities – like in life – which we choose, or which choose us.
They're not the utopias Thomas Moore, Thomas Campanella, or Jonathan Swift. They are not the cities of ancient Greece. They are not cities from modern science-fiction novels, nor are they “the city of the future” which my generation watched in a cartoon about the Jetson family. We make these real ones according to plans in which, as citizens, we can (and should) participate in various ways. due to the fact that they're ours. due to the fact that we have a voice in them. due to the fact that we choose our own hosts, but besides smaller local communities, in which we can (and should) propose and implement our own expectations, decisions, projects. Without our imaginations of the city, without engagement in the city, without tiny and large plans, it can turn into a desert (to which we complain that “nothing will be born here”) or into an open-air museum (after which there are joyful tourists). The city of the future must be ours... and we must draw this future. Combine the elements of dreams with the reality, as well as the scope of possibilities, options for a given city/place. due to the fact that that's the only way we're gonna feel at home that you want to go back to all another trip.
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“Isidora is the city of his dreams: with only 1 difference. The city he dreamed of included him in his youth; he comes to Isidora in the elderly," writes Italo Calvino. Only that in our journeys to those to cities, to another worlds, and above all to each another – You to me, I to you – it is not worth saving life for later. It is worth creating – both us and the cities. It is not worth waiting for desires to become memories.
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The Liberté Foundation invites you to the 2024 Freedom Games "City, Europe, Advantages"! 18-20.10.2024, EC1 in Łódź. strategical partners of the event are: City of Łódź and Łódź Event Center.
