The City is an installation by Aleksandra Stratimirovic that we’ll get to in a moment – her name is new to me, but her work is very deep. As a lighting artist, she’s created a variety of works, from luminares to Sunny Day, a backlit picture made from medical jars full of colored liquid. Beautiful work – very vibrant. It’s interesting enough to post about it in an article about another of her works.
From Aleksandra’s portfolio site, about Sunny Day:
Now, back to the original point of the article…
The City is installed right now in the County Administrative Court, Tegeluddsvägen 1 in Stockholm, Sweden – 150 hours’ worth of art and light mimicks the life of a city as seen from above, in a way. Obviously the beholder of this beauty wouldn’t be able to observe all 150 hours at once, but the fact that it’s constantly moving and evolving is beautiful enough – at least for me. I guess I’m simple.
Jacob Kimvall wrote this about The City and Aleksandra’s work:
Stratimirovic herself has written that her aim was to depict the melodies of a city in a tale of light, which would rather tend to suggest a reading as a concretization than any actual connection to sensory impressions from an external reality. Though for me it also brings to mind the stylistic designation of synesthesia, where different sensory impressions are woven together to create a unified experience. In instrumental jazz for example the depiction of night time city lights is such a commonplace that hardly anyone would even think of it as synesthesia any more.
Like a melody, The City also has an extension in time. It takes 150 hours in all for the programme to repeat. This duration makes it practically impossible to take in all at once, just like any really large city. This and the mention of “the melody of the city” make me think that it cannot refer to any particular city but rather to the city as a notion. The shifting images tell of a city of meetings and movement, of constant change and cyclic repetition.
I think the explanation is nearly as lovely as the installation. Please visit Aleksandra’s portfolio site. There’s lots of beautiful work to see.
Thanks, Mitja from Enlighter!
