Invisible City
Single channel video projection / 5min / Sound / 2005-2007
In Italo Calvino’s 1972 book “Invisible Cities”, a city is invisible in that it is malleable, continuously destroyed and rebuilt around the internal projections of each new visitor. Inspired by the Calvino novel, Invisible City is not a description of a place but a reenactment of an experience of strangeness, of being a stranger. A tribute to Calvino, “Invisible City” was filmed in Gomel, a small city in Belarus. The city is not far from the Zone, a two-hundred square mile stretch of land that was evacuated during the Chernobyl radiation leak in 1986. Time travels backwards in the Zone: the towns are disappearing under a new forest. The video was shot at night the first day I arrived in Belarus, and consciously uses disorientation as material to construct the view of the city.