Architectural models, surveillance footage and real-time imagery
Invisible cities by Jonas Dahlberg
Film 42 min, 2005
“…Jonas Dahlberg enbarked on the project “Invisible cities” in 2004. With a film and the publication of a book, the artist invites us to take a look at cities with a population between 10,000 and 100,000, where 550 milions people still lives today, but which have no truly specific character – on the whole they are invisible cities.
The artist chose this title as a linkage with the book by Italo Calvino and, just like the author, he is keen to construct his work like an architecture, like a “space which the reader can enter and explore, in which he can even get lost, but possibly also find the way out too”.
Here it is the spectator’s eye and the way it sees which inform the space, because there are no inhabitants present, and the city is given over in all its architectural obviousness. It is worth emphasizing that Jonas Dahlberg studied architecture, and that he finds in the art world the means to pursue his lines of thinking, In this sense, Invisible cities deals with forgotten cities, cities “between”, forgotten by politicians, newspapers and architects themselves. The way the artist’s eye sees aims at underscoring what is alike in all these spaces, and spectators have the impression of moving about in a single place, whereas the artist travelled six months from city to city. As he himself hails from one such city, he casts a critical eye thereupon, but an eye imbued with a certain affection. Through its content and its spatial positioning, the Invisible Cities project thus wavers between politics and poetics….”
(Extract from Press release FRAC Bourgogne – Exhibition “Invisible Cities” Fed, 2005)