Villes imaginées ( Imagined cities)

We all have an imagined city within ourselves,  made of pieces, recollections, imagined and desired places which might have existed, and might have been dreamt. In this space, there is freedom to recompose those cities of our childhood, whether they still stand or have been demolished, whether, they have grown like mushrooms to the point of being unrecognisable, or have slowly decayed.

I was always an expat, a foreigner, an “other”.

I carried within me the layers of my reconstructed landscapes, the one of my childhood, my adolescence, and later on the ones I had forgotten and reshaped various times into a new wonky construction.

An entity in its own right, one which belongs to me and no one else.  A dreamt composition which is mine, unique and rich.

This imagined city, is multiple and keeps expanding. It has lost places, memories of all sorts, people I met, languages I spoke, phrases I heard, and it is full of encounters, encounters of ideas, people and plants, landscape and townscapes.

In these imagined cities, there is a place for reconstructing what was lost, what was abandoned sometimes forcefully but never forgotten.

Mass migrations due to natural catastrophes, wars, climate change and globalised intolerance, are visible everywhere we live. This is a tribute to those who are displaced by force or by choice.

By creating Imagined cities, a link between old and new places which are held within ourselves, as a way of resisting the loss of precious territories, cities, neighbourhoods and homes and the possibly of re creating new ones.