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    urijoe visual memories from my travels into daily life

    Photos from China

    There are [6] photos from China

    Views[200] CONTINUUM / The geometry of the city is continuous. It lies outside the capacity of comprehensive perception. It is unfolded in its complexity like the magic of a pieces of paper that we open in our hands, by allowing the cuts to find their unique configuration in the physical dimensions. And then when you walk into the horizon of the noisy Shanghai, it is still possible to listen to the fragile whisper of papers in people's hands, you can see hands that unfold the physical height and depth together; those hands that cherish the memory of the ancestors and the foreseeing of new generations in the daily instant, where the dimensions of city geometry converge and replicate in always new shapes. Views[800] ROUNDNESS / The soul of the city is round. It is the circle where culture and economics converge and melt. It is the safe place where the center is protected, where from it can expand further. As any camps in the history of primordial societies, they have been built around convergent center and divergent expansion directions; a fire bounds them, it reminds where is the light of home. Despite the urbanization sprawl, people continue nowadays to light up fires and to trace lines to get home safely. They draw circles to bring bodies and souls where they belong to, in space and time. Downtown, people celebrates lunar rituals also when the moon itself is hidden by the peaks of modernity. Views[697] PROFUNDITY / Nevertheless, cities are rooted down. The highest the peak, the strongest has to be the ground. The long shadows of urbanization often hide its own backstage, that in China is undoubtedly rural, but with the same possibly infinitely long bamboo tools that allow mankind to get closer to the sky, someone keeps on digging deeper. Horizontal flows are vigorously nurtured by the hearth, thanks to the humans that balance the city geometry in between peaks and abyss. Views[714] HEIGHT / We push cities up on a stairway to heaven, by giving for granted that heavens lies upon us. Mankind collects energy and strength in the horizontal flows, and pour it vigorously towards more and more high summit. We together strive for a newer peak, we rise on possibly infinitely long bamboo scaffolding, we work for an extended boundary: in the heights we look for more space, however by giving away the continuum of the horizontal space, by fragmenting our plane of equilibrium. Views[673]
     
    HORIZON / This story is about the geometry of cities, the dimensions of their spatial and immaterial structure, the shape of their souls. It is the story I tell myself whilst being exploring Shanghai and its maze, whilst continuously playing with the focalization adjustment between the physical space and the spiritual place that are melted together in the urbanization continuum. We continuously perceive physical details of the space, by the glimpses of being travelers, citizens, flaneurs, nomads; we look up to the peaks of building, but our bodies move across, horizontally. We perceive cities by their altitude, but what we really see is at the level of the view, is the glimpse of the neighborhood that stills in front of us, is the shadow that stay longer when people come along with their carts. Looking up we perceive boundaries, looking horizontally we perceive inner motions: city lives horizontally, creatures and artifacts flows alongside and diverge at crossroads, when the horizon breaks the shadows. Views[671]     

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