MAPLE HE
Urban Installation:
Hidden City: A Mobile Cemara Obscura
#Koekamp#Scheveningen
22-23 Mar 2017
Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972, p. 87
Drawing is symbolized and coded. It exposes you yet the truth remains concealed in the strokes. Old masters used the camera obscura to create realistic landscape pictures. We invite people in The Hague to look at the city through this technique in a mobile structure travelling from the Koekamp to Scheveningen. Light enters the dark chamber through a small hole and an inverted image of the outside is projected inside. The skyline becomes an eye-level encountering. Another end of the urban landscape is presented.
The city is always pre-fabricated. Our unique images and feelings about a city come along later than the existence of city, which can only end up being hushed down or overlooked by ourselves. As Italo Calvino writes in his Invisible Cities, “For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name.”
As the darkness resolves and the shades of color return… This is a city you only see when recognition grows from dear memories.
Team members: Mila Baumann, Joyce Edel, Bart Krijen