urijoe visual memories from my travels into daily life

without skyscrapers

CHINA | Monday, 8 July 2013 | Views [694] | View Larger Image

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.

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.

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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.

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urijoe visual memories from my travels into daily life

without skyscrapers

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