Sound-Text

“Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” – Italo Calvino

InvisibleCities3_lg — Performance of Through Invisible Cities, in which the viewers listened to the 40-minute work in the dark; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; November, 1998

About Through Invisible Cities

Through Invisible Cities is a mental journey to be experience in a darkened space: a voice talks from a world of inner pictures that were once inspired by our world. It is a trip through nostalgia and the anguish of time lost. A trip for those who travel by foot and on their own. A trip for those who like to stare. For those who struggle to exist. And if we consider the ghosts of our thoughts, the regrets we all discover at some point, it is a trip for all of us. So the voice speaks. As if dripping off of somebody we cannot see. But does this dripping eventually make a pool? No. Like the passing of time, the cities in this voice dissolve in the dark. We can only recognize them in the echoes that make up our identities. They exist only through sound and have therefore a presence in the flow of time, not in space. – Belén García-Alvarado

Music

Text and spoken word by Belén García-Alvarado, music composed by Randall Packer. Included is a selection of “invisible cities” from the full-length work. It is advised to listen with headphones in a darkened space for total immersion in the sonic space.