Abducted Cities

Molte sono le città come Fillide che sono si sottraggono

agli sguardi tranne che se le cogli di sorpresa.
Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili

What could be the form of a city? A concept, the plan of an urban planner; the
amalgam of physical, sonorous, odoriferous, individual and collective experiences;
a set of images, a story, a history book, a dream? The catalogue of forms is infinite,
as each form seeks to find its city. Meanwhile, every single person has in mind a
city made up only of differences, a city with no fixed figures nor form, to be filled
by our experience. The then redundant memory begins to repeat the signs
allowing therefore the city to begin to exist.

Cities are a set of many things: memories, desires, signals and signs; they are
places of barter, where not only commodities, bust also words, desires, and
memories are bartered. The city that Maia Gusberti invites us to discover emerges
paradoxically from the image of an absence, which proliferates paradoxically in a
profusion of filiform figures, which are displayed in a slippery, timeless and
altogether subtle way. The city appears to us as a whole in which no desire is lost
and of which we take part as active observers. And since the city enjoys everything
that we do not, we have nothing left but to inhabit that desire which leaves us
content.

The city appears before our eyes trough recognizable procedures such as
fragmentation, discontinuity, travelling, anonymity, not to mention the
heterogeneity of media – comprised of books, maps, photos, videos, text –, in short,
the city emerges here as unfinished, without name or place. What happens then is
what happens with dreams: if everything and anything can be dreamed, the fact
remains that even the most unexpected dream is a riddle that hides a desire, or its
inverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are built out of desires and fears, rather than
walls. Although the thread of their (urban) discourse is secret, their rules are
absurd, their perspectives are deceptive, and every element hides an otherness.
Thus, Gusberti alludes to a city that extends far beyond the discourse that
describes it, the history that traps it, the beings that inhabit it, as in a metonymic
gesture that would allow all possible cities to be deduced at the same time.

A new relationship to emptiness appears at this juncture. We have already seen

this phenomenon happening in works such as Landscapes Un(folded) (2012) and
Fragments of a city without a map (2012); this relationship appears here as a
glimpse of what we see, and then succumbs to that infinite ungraspable element
representative of images. The city becomes doubly abstract in its own rectangular
grid – and in that imposed by the setting –, absolutely confined to its eternal
reinterpretation. It is a city made up only of exceptions, impediments,
contradictions, incongruities, and nonsense. From one extreme to the other it
seems that the city is multiplied in perspective through its repertoire of images.
But there is no thickness: it consists only out of an imaginary situation that creates
the illusion of the city; in the form of a sheet of paper that one cannot look nor
distract his attention from.

It would seem that Gusberti speaks to us more about our own desire, which pushes
us to recompose a city we imagine we know everything about, but a city in fact
about which nobody really knows anything anymore. This “particular” city, at once
several ones and one, seems infinitely abducted from our gaze.

Sara Alonso Gómez

Bern, 1 April 2019