La Città Visibile

The Visible City is the result of a long photographic research on the changes of Rome urban landscape. Through a an ironic or surreal vision of the advertising images which appear on means of transportation, posters and billboards placed on the facades of buildings in restoration I have tried to emphasize the unusual and surprising relationship between the real city and the one shown in the ephemeral publicity: a woman’s face who seems to drink from a fountain, a Concorde flying though an unexisting sky, some mysterious fleeing figures, a gigantic and fascinating paper world which more and more influences our real world. There is no long trace of these images which appeared in cult places of the Capital city. The contemporary city is characterizewd by a dimension in which the artifice and the visual illusion overplay the urban reality as Italo Calvino had prophetised in Marcovaldo and in The Invisible Cities, from which derives the title of my work. The city of Tamara, for instance, contains in nuce contemporary urban landscapes where “people enter streets full of signs coming out of walls. The eye does not see things, but images of things that refer to other things“.

The images, taken with an analogical or digital camera, have not been digitally elaborated.