EXPOSICIONS

Stropharia Cubensis or the dream of the city

In his book The Invisible Cities Italo Calvino describes the imaginaries cities visited by Marco Polo, ambassador for the great emperor Kublai Khan, during his travels.

In one of his attempts to describe the great city of Zaira, the Venetian traveller basically says that city’s physical and architectural build-up do not offer us the complete picture since the city does not consist of them only, but also of “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past”.

Thus, the city, as a small empire and a metaphor of life, overcomes the concrete geographical boundaries and moves towards that intangible something (a dream maybe?) that provides plenty of space for interpretation and personal preference.

In a series of Isaac Sibecas’ photos entitled Stropharia Cubensis, the alienated city is invisible, in a sense that it is blurred to the point of losing its definition, and the very alienation becomes proportional to the impossibility of tracing the local surrounding. By turning the city into an image, and indeed a very particular one, every Sibecas’ photo deconstructs the image itself, but also the usual representation models.

The author’s unique idea of blending photography and Psilocybe (a species of psychedelic mushroom previously known as Stropharia cubensis) resulted in a series of visually distorted images of bright-coloured, vivid houses with breathing walls and grotesque atmosphere. As if stepped out of an eccentric fairytale, these dancing Amsterdam cubes sway and bend, extend and multiply, leaving the observers dizzy and mesmerised in this game of overlapped shapes and objects, one real dream within a dream within a dream induced hallucination.