Abstract
Experimental novelist Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities was published in 1972 as a series of “overhead conversations” between Kublai Kahn, notorious Mongol emperor, and Marco Polo, explorer. Although categorized as a novel, that description does not apply in any traditional sense. The structure of Invisible Cities adheres to a mathematical pattern known as Oulipo. Rather than a traditional narrative arc, the novel comprises descriptions of cities, organized into categories.
For this assignment, I chose to 3 dimensionally illustrate the trading city, Ersillia. The city of Ersilia consists of spiderwebs and weaves made from various strings, “...labyrinth of taut strings and poles. The inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.”
After combining all the visual cues that were given in the text and experimenting with different techniques I chose to draw a sketch onto a circular wooden sheet, hammer nails onto the drawing so that I could stretch out thread from one nail to another tracing my drawing into a 3D weave with shades of grey, black and white, representing the city of Ersillia.
