The Improbable City

This year’s commissions programme takes its title from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, first published in 1972, and long established as a seminal work for artists and architects.  Calvino’s short novella takes the form of an imagined conversation between Marco Polo and the Kublai Khan, in which the famous explorer describes to the world weary emperor a succession of fantastical cities he has visited on his travels.  As it dawns on the Khan that the cities Polo describes are almost certainly entirely imaginary, Polo acknowledges the struggle which lies at the heart of his model, his need to balance ‘exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions’ with the probable, to avoid achieving ‘cities too probable to be real’.

 

Edinburgh might not be out of place in Marco Polo’s catalogue of improbable cities. Renowned for centuries for its fairytale and picturesque qualities, the city has always felt equally at home in the worlds of reality and fiction. Calvino’s short prose poems are not only utterly convincing in the pictures of cities they manage to evoke, but as Marco Polo himself admits, it is the very presence of the incongruous and improbable which makes his cities seem all the more real.

 

Improbable cities depend on the imagination to exist.  Our 2015 festival programme celebrates the work of visual artists who vividly conjure alternative imaginary worlds through their work, and considers how it is often the improbable which illuminates the real.  With an emphasis on projects created for public spaces, the programme brings together a broad range of practices and approaches, utopianand dystopian, anarchic and romantic, and as well as work by leading and emerging Scottish practitioners, includes new work by 3 international artists showing in the UK for the first time.

 

 

This year's projects are made possible thanks to the generous support of the following funders and sponsors: