A sonic interpretation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities 

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is an architectural exploration of the complex relationships between memory, place, subjectivity and desire. Told through accounts of 55 fictitious cities, Will stands in as our tour guide, inviting us to look out of ‘sound windows’ that look out onto some of Calvino’s fantastical spaces.  

In Ersilla, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the mesh of strings becomes too much and the inhabitants can no longer walk through the streets, they leave to set up a new city. All that remains is a labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain; spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

“These are fantastical, beguiling places, where things are never as they seem. There's Hypatia, a city of beautiful blue lagoons but where "crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks"; Laudomia, the city of the unborn, whose inhabitants have constructed a parallel city for those yet to come; Octavia, the spider-web city, whose residents live suspended over an abyss, supported by a net they know won't last long; and Argia, a city with earth instead  of air.”

With a background in songwriting, composition and performance honed through development deals at Abbey Road and Miloco Studios, m In the last two years Will has expanded his practice towards story telling and sonic world building. While on a dual 3-part residency with both Bristol’s Noods Radio and London’s Voices he has had the opportunity to experiment and develop a unique style and format that uses sound collage and detailed stylised sound design to immerse an audience within the setting of a fictional creative agency. Part workplace satire part absurdist meditation the angle into the world encourages us to consider creative decision making situated within the contemporary context of rapidly expanding technologies - and offers us a playful exploration of the future of work - generational relationships within the hierarchical context of the workplace, and the tension between authentic art and the commercial. 

Image by Archie Fitzgerald  https://archiefitzgerald.com/

Access with Festival Pass or Saturday 1 Day Pass