Invisible (Cities)

I wasn’t intend to make a book about cities in the first place, the original open call was titled Black and White. At certain level it means monochrome, and it’s a very minimal way of seeing. So I’d like to try making issue 5 with all the collected works depending on this topic. Everytime I edit waterfall it’s like an unknown journey to explore, I don’t know what’s ahead, but there will be a path to somewhere once I decided to move forward. I looked into these works, many of them are images belong to the cities, views from the streets. Most of them express the feeling in a personal, sentimental way, as I’m dealing my relation to a city. Fine then, I thought, I will puzzle them together to look like a map about cities, even it’s scattered and twisted, for covering the initial idea: a way of seeing. I never take the city as a concrete presence, but a result of comparing. We live (in) it to keep it alive.

However, the works featured in this book were only a tiny part from what I’ve collected. Some of familiar landscape of Elephant and Castle, Stockholm or Taipei, a food list while staying in Berlin, the impact of Hong Kong, the conflict, the love affair....or a found postcard in Paris and so on, we just happened to be there then. In the postscript section, there’s project based on the community from the island Tristan da Cunha, it’s to show the concept of city from an opposite angle. In the same section, to back to the initial idea, Hundred Views of Fiction and Mount Rowland both are concerning the issue of seeing. In addition, there’s the Listener’s Manual in the final part of the book as an extended response.

我原本不是要做一本關於城市的書,最初開放投稿的主題叫做黑與白,在某個層面上來說看不到顏色,在低限度的觀看前提下,我想知道依這個主題蒐集而來的題材我 可以做出什麼樣的瀑布。每每編輯瀑布的過程就如同拓荒一樣,我也不曉得前頭有什麼,但繼續往前走下去無論如何都會開出一條路徑,通往某處。我看著這些的作 品,許多許多是城市的景色,街上的日常劇場,但情緒上卻又多半是私人的,善感的,而我面對一座城市的關係也是如此。我想好吧,我把它們拼成一個和城市有關 的地圖,就算是歪曲零散的模樣也好,用以覆蓋關於觀看這件事。我從來都不覺得城市是摸得到的,它只是一個相較比對下的產物,我們身處其中讓它活著。

書裡面的作品都不過是我撿拾到的一小角,大象城堡、斯德哥爾摩或是台北,有些眼熟的風景和事件,柏林的飲食記錄,香港印象,衝突,戀情,巴黎拾獲的明信片等 等,只是我們剛好於彼於此而已。後注裡有篇以特里斯坦達庫尼亞群島住民群落為主體的創作計畫,是以相反的面向讓城市這個意象更清楚一些。回到最初,收在書 末的羅蘭山和虛構百景則是在講觀看這件事,除此之外,最後再順帶一提聆聽的種種作為延伸的回應。

Contributors

Christian Göran, 懋, Weiwei, Jonny Cochrane, Daisuke Yokota, E-Tang Chen, Yen-Wei Cheng, ChengHung Chiu, Yuhki Touyama, RenZhong Lin, ShihAn Chiang, Son Ni, Chi Hoi, Lewis Chaplin, Oliver Dignal, HsinHui Kou, PeiLing Tan