Cities from Le città invisibili

When my friend and I thought about the concept of city, especially of the grand contemporary cities like Shanghai, we felt that a true overlook and generalization is almost impossible, an integral contemporary city does not exist or is not visible. The individuals that live and travel in these cities comprehend them, inevitably, from a one-sided, subjective, and delusional perspective. Rather than saying that “Shanghai” is a vast, complex, polymerized and integral city, it is better to say that it’s the general designation of many separate, strange, irrelevant and completely different cities. City is the fragments of the many imagined cities, they are the cities that Marco Polo once traveled. The video begins with a passage in Cities & Memories 5 and after the presentation of the title, a dialogue between Kublai and Marco Polo about describing and experiencing the city. The main content of the video consists of the separate parts of four cities selected from the book: Zaira, Cloe, Isaura, and Zora. The unfinished ending is another dialogue between the two characters, which again presented Kublai Khan’s confusion and questioning. Photography by Cai Minhao.