Cities & Names

20061120

Workshop with Diego Pitarch

( The story of city)

There is little I can tell you about Aglaura beyond the things its own inhabitants have always repeated: an array of proverbial virtues, of equally proverbial faults, a few eccentricities, some punctilious regard for rules. Ancient observers, whom there is no reason not to presume truthful, attributes to Aglaura its enduring assortment of qualities, surely comparing them to those of the other cities of their times. Perhaps neither the Aglaura that is reported nor the Aglaura that is visible has greatly changed since then, but what was bizarre has become usual, what seemed normal is now an oddity, and virtues and faults have lost merit or dishonor in a code of virtues and faults differently distributed. In this sense, nothing said of Aglaura is true, and yet these accounts create a solid and compact image of a city, whereas the haphazard opinions which might be inferred from living there have less substance. This is the result : the city that they speak of has much of what is needed to exist, whereas the city that exists on its site, exists less.
So if I wished to describe Aglaura to you, stricking to what I personally saw and experienced, I should have to tell you that it is a colorless city, without character, planted there at random. But this would not be true, either : at certain hours, in certain places along the street, you see opening before you the hint of something unmistakable, rare, perhaps magnificent ; you would like to say what it is, but everything previously said of Aglaura imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat rather than say.
Therefore, the inhabitants still believe they live in an Aglaura which grows only with the name Aglaura and they do not notice the Aglaura that grows on the ground. And even I, who would like to keep the two cities distinct in my memory, can speak only of the one, because the recollection of the other, in the lack of words to fix it, has been lost.

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My work was from these questions.... How can people say that the ancient city exsit or not? What is true? Can you believe the city even you did not see it? How does the city look like? colorless and dry?

It is Nothing.. exist, not exist(It is different with absent)...

I intended to show two different cities.. I supposed that it lookes like city by the covered building shape in the outside however in the inside, it is nonexistent city and it could be nothing. There was empty...

How and what do you believe?
What is the true?