Zaira, City of Memories

The Author's description:

A hypertext project on Italo Calvino’s "Invisible Cities", formed as a “city reading/creating”, is presented.

The project is based solely on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: architecture of content structure, text as quotations and visual content as documentation. One of the texts, “Cities and Memory 3”, played a triggering role and the city described in that text –Zaira– is at the center; all the narration flows in the surroundings of her. 3 cities, Ankara (where I was born), Istanbul (where I live) and London (where I want to live) are chosen, based on the different periods of my life and the depth of my experiences. These three cities are soaking up memories and are fed by the book, so a new city –Zaira– is formed by their “loss of boundary” in the mind. Calvino narrates one real city, Venice, in the whole book by dispelling her to imaginary ones; Calvino’s narrative process starts to flow again with this project realised by a reader as he wants to achieve. The openness and continuity of the book are proved by applying the method vice versa: like recreating the visuals from the text, the invisible cities are also turned into real ones. He has separated Venice to 55 texts so 55 imaginary cities are formed – but now, Zaira stores 3 real ones in her imaginary identity. “Zaira, City of Memories” is a hypertext project: the structure is based on the book’s content table which tries to give an idea of non-linear reading to the reader. The aim is to rebuild the content in an equivalent medium that emphasizes its own non-linear dynamic nature which has been created supremely by Calvino.

(Source: Author's description at the project site)