Zora – The City That Remains Unchanged

In Italo Calvino’s book invisible cities, Kublai Khan experiences the cities through the eyes of Marco Polo as he describes them from his memory. When reading about each cities, the one that stood out to me was Zora – the city that remains unchanged. Zora’s biggest strength is that it has unchangeable, intricate patterns that aid to memory but ironically the motionless nature of Zora is what makes it quite mundane and forgettable. I found it interesting how our brain recognizes patterns and repetitions so quickly and eventually finds them mundane yet it can easily detect the smallest change in the pattern. It was also interesting to see how differently the two artists in the paintings above depicted Zora.

Click here to check out more art inspired by the invisible cities.