City Metamorphosis: Living Archive for a cinematic experience in space

Natalia Pośnik

Keywords: Film, Archive, Foundfootage

instagram.com/posniq

The real city lies only in your imagination. The fake city is here, in front of you. It plays with you, it’s unexpected and never looks the same twice. Have you seen it before? Me neither.

Graduation Project

Within the project titled City Metamorphosis: Living Archive for a cinematic experience in space, I take a look into the relationship between film and architecture. I investigate the imaginary concept of the city of Łódź based on the archival materials of the film industry and express my fascination with the phenomenon of metamorphosis taking place in the urban fabric.

The city is my personal archive - a living platform by which I test the boundary between facts and fiction in documentary art. As a designer, I investigate the visual tools that contribute to a better understanding of urban space and create new stories as an archivist.

Driven by the topographic fascination of mine – topophilia in the sense of the love of place, I develop the methodology which allows me to collect, describe and analyze the cinematic space in one fictional framework. This framework I call urban cinematic mapping which serves as the base of further exploration of the topic.

The city I expose is fragmented and it only represents truth to a certain extent. Therefore, every exploratory participant of my visual research should be critical to what is presented on the image, and the best way to confront the information with its context is to explore the city personally. The main target group of my project is every person who lives in the city or wants to get to know the city better. It can be as a temporal user of the city, tourist, architect, cinema lover, a filmmaker, as an ordinary inhabitant interested in the visual history of Łódź. All of these people have the potential to become a living archivist who primarily explores the past image of the city and ultimately creates a new future out of the preselected past.

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email nposnik@gmail.com

instagram @posniq