Ersilia 2k15 is a visual translation, a reversed Ekphrasis of one of the invisible cities by Italo Calvino.
In the book, the wires visually mark the relationships and the displacements in the city. Traces of its inhabitants and their lives, both private and public.
Ersilia kept on moving and mutated, becoming more and more complex,invisible and virtual. Where is Ersilia now?
In this exercise, Milan, as Ersilia, can be read through its wires, here represented with tram's cables.
Different pictures of cables taken at Porta Genova are progressively overlaid. Every time Ersilia 2k15 stops, it is rebuilt, increasing its complexity.
ERSILIA
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, 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, or 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.
From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away. Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.
Invisible cities, Italo Calvino, 1972
