Reverie of Ginger City – A Dialogue between Two Cities
“Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plentitude of the soul.” – Gaston Bachelard
Imagine descending into the New York subway and emerging in the South American city of Santiago, Chile. Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities is a point of departure for this exhibition’s “poetry of the invisible.” Amela Parcic, currently an artist-in-residence, describes this as the feeling she has when she is walking through a city: “Sometimes I find myself in the city of Belgrade or Zagreb or Paris, although I am physically still in New York. A yellow subway platform in NYC invokes the feeling of standing on a bridge someplace else.” The dislocation makes for a unique urban split-reality: past experiences resurface and become rearranged, and new experiences take a side-step to the mind’s capacity to form associations with familiar surroundings. To an immigrant who has moved multiple times, the action of wandering also invokes a hint of nostalgia.
In “Reverie of Ginger City,” Amela has created an imaginary city composed of double exposure photographs of places in New York and Santiago. Using only analog photography, the film has been doubly exposed in both cities over this past month with the assistance of a collaborator in Santiago. There is a poetry that is created through the interaction of the displaced places.
Amela attempts to create an expandable city experience by presenting the result of this project in two different settings. The opening of this two-night event is on August 27th, where the photographs will be presented in an environment set to the soundtrack of a Spanish and English reading of Invisible Cities. The two languages blur to form a continuous humming. On the second night, August 28th, composer Dylan Neely will play an experimental sound piece to accompany the environment of Ginger City.