Ash Tower, Samstag Scholar, speaks about the work he has produced during his residency at the BSR ahead of the Spring Open Studios 2025.
I continue making stars. They’ve anchored themselves in my mind and I’ve started to faithfully drift towards them in my walks through the city. My reading, too, has been drawn into their orbit—and I found great meaning in Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. I’ve included a passage below
Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet’s orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids. The city’s calendar is so regulated that jobs and offices and ceremonies are arranged in a map corresponding to the firmament on that date: and thus the days on earth and the nights in the sky reflect each other."
Though it is painstakingly regimented, the city’s life flows calmly like the motion of the celestial bodies and it acquires the inevitability of phenomena not subject to human caprice. In praising Andria’s citizens for their productive industry and their spiritual ease, I was led to say: I can well understand how you, feeling yourselves part of an unchanging heaven, cogs in a meticulous clockwork, take care not to make the slightest change in your city and your habits. Andria is the only city I know where it is best to remain motionless in time.
They looked at one another dumbfounded. “But why? Whoever said such a thing?” And they led me to visit a suspended street recently opened over a bamboo grove, a shadow-theatre under construction in the place of the municipal kennels, now moved to the pavilions of the former lazaretto, abolished when the last plague victims were cured, and – just inaugurated – a river port, a statue of Thales, a toboggan slide.
“And these innovations do not disturb your city’s astral rhythm?” I asked.
“Our city and the sky correspond so perfectly,” they answered, “that any change in Andria involves some novelty amongst the stars.” The astronomers, after each change takes place in Andria, peer into their telescopes and report a nova’s explosion, or a remote point in the firmament’s change of color from orange to yellow, the expansion of a nebula, the bending of a spiral of the Milky Way. Each change implies a sequence of other changes, in Andria as among the stars: the city and the sky never remain the same.
As for the character of Andria’s inhabitants: two virtues are worth mentioning: self-confidence and prudence. Convinced that every innovation in the city influences the sky’s pattern, before taking any decision they calculate the risks and advantages for themselves and for the city and for all worlds.
For Calvino, Andria is a city of order—in opposition to the intoxicating crush of Rome. But to an outsider (for whom the rhythms of the city and the sky are inscrutable) there’s little difference between order and chaos. Rome seems to drag its history along behind it, like the tail of a great comet. Its ancient and modern forms are tangled into each other, just as metro tunnels coil through the endless ruins and catacombs.
The sky here is unfamiliar to me. For a while now I’ve been staring up to find new patterns in the cosmos, visited briefly by planes and satellites shooting overhead. If I looked into the sky to find my way (or perhaps tell my future) I’m met with unknown constellations leering back. And so, I keep finding the cosmos in the city—stars on the obelisks, in graffiti in the street, on LED signs on the pharmacies, and on the myriad sculptures and edifices of the city.
I’m starting to wonder if I see the stars everywhere because they’re inscribed in the lenses of my eyes or the inside of my skull, like an image burned into an old TV screen. It’s become an infection of bias, where all I can do is see radiant stars and coiled twisted forms. Just as the astronomers of Andria find evidence in their telescopes that the heavens have bent to reflect their city. Thinking on this star-sickness and the city, I returned to The Madness of Vision by Christine Buci-Glucksmann, to a line which has lay dormant in my head for a while:
“As if it required every impulse, in foreign languages, every path to knowledge and its limits, every accumulated death and starlit burning, in order to return to the very site of the first blind and blinding gaze: a baroque rapture, a private myth.”
I am beautifully exhausted by this place, and even the parts that seem familiar—when approached from a different angle or time—seem to unfold into new qualities of space. I felt this compulsion to see everything, until I took heart in a passage from Invisible Cities:
“Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
“Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer […]”
