Nostalgia of cities: response to Callum's response to Sam

Nostalgia of cities: response to Callum's response to Sam 

Looking at Sam's personal account of nostalgia in cities and Callum's personification of ageing cities through architecture, reminded me of an exhibition I saw recently which explored how to capture personal and architectural nostalgia in art. 

Sam - 

"The city is definitely nostalgic. Every corner can have a personal memory, for sure, but holds thousands of memories that you personally will never experience. Each specific square inch of a city will mean a different thing to different people, some happy, some sad, some wistful, some scary. That is the beauty and the ineffability of nostalgia. " 

Callum -

"'Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away itself and challenging the future' 

This of course makes sense, as New York is a far younger city than Rome. But I found myself thinking where does London fit into its own relationship with its past and its future. I think London is (perhaps like a lot of other European cities) a city that encompasses the middle point between the city that has learnt to grow old and the city which pushes to reinvent itself. [...] This kind of collision of the two architectural styles I think is symbolic with London's own relationship with itself. In one hand its a city that boasts a rich history, once being the center of the world in terms of trade (and all the cultural and imperial implications of that), whilst now being one of the many global epicenters of a heavily finacialised global economy (which that style of architecture, for me at least, heavily embodies)."

Living Cities

This exhibition was particularly striking to me as a collection of artists responses to their cities. I have selected two artists who are particularly interesting in regards to the concept of nostalgia.

Kader Attia 

The first being that of Kader Attia, who recreates the ancient Algerian city Ghardaïa entirely from couscous. The artist explores the their own history of nostalgia with the city, but also the broader post-colonial relationship between Algeria and France.





 


The second artist is Damián Ortega, who works in Mexico and Germany. In these pieces, called "Skin" Ortega reproduces giant blueprints of building in leather, thread, tattoo ink and graphite. Ortega takes three modernist buildings and has cut out the floor plan of a single apartment unit in leather. The leather floor plan was then hung from a meat hook from the ceiling.  Exploring the contrast between architectural theory, memory of cities as cold, concrete, in-organic spaces with soft organic hanging scultpures. I believe Ortega to be inviting us to engage with the organicness of memory, as nostalgia of spaces as distinctly human.



This leaves me questioning if we are ever really nostalgic for inanimate things or spaces or are nostalgic for the experiencing of those spaces and things. It is not the gameboy that I feel nostalgic for, it is the sense of delight at following a path laid out for me. This makes me reflect upon the blog post that I wrote about Gamification. 




by Mylo