Invisible Cities, 2023

I taught two 3-week sessions of Sculpture at Interlochen summer of 23. Through preliminary 3D exercises and discussions, 7/8th grade students designed sculpture projects inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities book. After learning the format and style of the short pieces in the book, many students invented their own cities, but sometimes borrowed structural elements, such as a spiral staircase or a city hanging delicately above a precipice. (This was a revisit of the concept of an installation I produced with youth while a resident at Santa Fe Art Institute 10 years prior.) We mounted 2 exhibits with these large-scale sculptures, the second being in a historic schoolhouse on the grounds just for our class. I worked fiendishly managing many processes and materials such as plaster, wire, wood, self-hardening clay, foam, cardboard, Mylar, lights, and more. I procured the boat from the northern Michigan woods and for the exhibit, we filled it with sand and short descriptions of each member of the group’s City renditions that drove their projects.

I chose the city of Thekla to represent the whole project:

“Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask, “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” The inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, “So that its destruction cannot begin.” And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, “Not only the city.”

If, dissatisfied with the answers, someone puts his eye to a crack in a fence, he sees cranes pulling up other cranes, scaffoldings that embrace other scaffoldings, beams that prop up other beams. “What meaning does your construction have?” he asks. “What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city? Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?” “We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now,” they answer.

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. “There is the blueprint,” they say.”