Chinese city
Chinese city presents photographs taken during night walks through the city of Chengdu between 2009-2011, then later in other cities across China.
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Entering the night side of the city feels like diving into an ocean of diffuse light that has submerged the landscape and shifted its reality. The homogeneity of colour tones, the succession of wide avenues and narrow lanes, the emptiness and scale of a urban world that only reveals hints of human presence, all contribute to transform these night hikes into the exploration of unfamiliar subaquatic canyons. Buildings become looming masses fading into the thick atmosphere, into the lesser reality of the background. Like so many theater stages, locations take on a meaning of their own, stripped of the context and interpretations given by daytime colours and activities.
Empty, brightly lit open spaces are unusual. They instill at the edge of consciousness a feeling of apprehension. Night after night, I walk through this disproportioned and hazy world like in a giant maze, seeking hideaways at the periphery of light. Muffled sounds and stillness create a shelter for solitude, bright lights blazing on brutally empty avenues hypnotizing the mind. Urban scenery turned into the fantastic landscapes of modern fairy tales.
Combined with this intuitive and subjective exploration of the landscape is a personal search for elements of the identity of a city that went through more than a century of vast social movements and rapid economic development. Nowhere more so than in China are newly (re)built metropolis thought as visually uniform and devoid of identity markers, yet this view is iteself also reductionnist, biased and rarely informed by the specific evolution of a place. However, there remains the question of whether what makes a city visually unique can even be found or identified.
These photographs are eventually produced out of the tension between this search, steeped in visual reality, for the essence of the city and the projection of the photographer’s own fictions.
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Project statement in Italian (traduzione italiana)
