The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. ![]() The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. All dreams, all desires and fears then seem to transform through photography into pictorial words, all mental images are attached to urbanscapes. The material of these ‘small worlds’ is the material of dreams: ‘cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears’. Tiny moments are captured and offer us an ‘inside view’, pictorial aspects of the many ‘small worlds’ that in our daily routine we may pass by unawares. This city which is many cities together and altogether no city at all or as Calvino might have said: an ‘inferno’. The photographer has embarked on a continuous pursuit of chances and of coincidences in a redemptive attempt to discover the veiled, the covert nature of this city. Therefore, although these photographs are revealing of the city’s true life, they also emerge as a constant reminder of our inability to ever fully perceive it. Bodies and faces, ruins and statues, urban and sea scapes, skies and shadows, buildings and wall graffiti, they all become elements of a language that is ultimately deceitful. Athens is being photographed and thus deciphered, but, at the same time, it is getting yet more evasive, revealing its elusiveness in front of our eyes. All the photographs have captured and reveal ‘corners’ and moments of hidden meaning in the city of Athens. However, here the text is treated as a sort of palimpsest: sometimes a few words and/or phrases are deliberately omitted and thus new meaning is generated to harmonise with the Athenian micro-cities newly emerging through his photographs. His photographs are accompanied by extracts from Calvino’s corresponding awe-inspiring, poetic descriptions of the 55 imaginary cities. every aspect on which Drolapas focuses hints at a connection with the 55 model cites depicted by Calvino. The ancient city which allures the tourists and the decadent city of abandoned immigrants, the city that bears the hideous face of crisis and the desperation of loneliness, the city of fake glitter and fragile confidence, the hidden city of the future with its clay feet, the city with the facade of hope that is given to those without hope, etc. The result of this journey is an in-depth reflection upon the city of Athens, its life and its infinite facets. And as in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, there could be multiple potential courses along this projected spiral. At the same time he also ‘travels’ along the course of a hypothetical Fibonacci spiral as it is projected upon the wider area of the city of Athens, using the Acropolis hill as the starting point for his photographic journey. Drolapas closely follows the sequence of Calvino’s 55 model cities and the categories that these fall into. The structure of the book is such that it allows multiple readings furthermore, it invokes the Fibonacci sequence, that is, a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The main theme of Invisible Cities revolves around cities, their nature, civilization, and ultimately around the view of the world as ‘a system of systems’. ![]() The project follows the structure of Calvino’s masterpiece: 55 chapters include the descriptions of an equal number of cities under 11 different titles (thematic units) each repeated 5 times. Anargyros Drolapas’ photographic project, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, constitutes a study of the city of Athens, a meditation on its multifaceted and complex character.
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