“In the city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Hidden Cities is a story from Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. It is a hauntingly beautiful depiction of a paradoxical land called Raissa where sadness & happiness, darkness & light, negative & positive are directly linked and balanced.
This abstract model of the narrative uses 1/4″ = 1′ scale. It features two main worlds – one above ground and one flipped below ground, connected by a peculiar new dimension. It is reminiscent of several well-known fictional places: the Underworld from the play Eurydice; Stranger Things’ Upside Down; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’s Narnia, and the mysterious Universe A Wrinkle in Time is set in. In Raissa’s universe, everything is just slightly off; directions are arbitrary, sadness is jagged yet warm, and the normal world may not be quite right, after all.
A tree grows tall in the normal world, sending strong roots underground through the in-between. The roots shoot up into the dark land, jagged and dead. Yet here it would appear these jagged roots are a plant extending down into the normal world, where the tree has now become the jagged plant’s roots. Raissa poses the question: what is normal?
Sketch model to final model:
All designs & images copyright Emily Müller, ©2018.
emily müller 