"...it is to recall some traces some cities have left in me" by Victor Burgin

Some people just know what to say...
amazed by how Victor Burgin discribes the city.
well... it's not simply about city but also about our life, memory and relations to other people.
which is also a main theme of my work like lots of other people.
I can pretty much emphasize my emotions and thoughts with his words about city/relations with people.
besides reading this book evoked me to recall exactly how i felt and what i thought while i was traveling.

happy to find such a captivating work of his. :)

I haven't been able to clarify my thoughts neatly nor project it successfully onto my work yet.
however this book surely is giving me a positive influence to move forward and has stimulated me to initiate a new project!

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from a book, Some Cities by Victor Burgin. (1996, University of California Press: California)

p.7

Our relations with cities are like our relations with people. We love them, or are indifferent toward them. On our first day in a city is that is new to us, we go looking for the city. We go down this street, around that corner. We are aware of the faces of passers-by. But the city eludes us, and we become uncertain whether we are looking for a city, or for a person.

We cannot know a 'city', only those of its places we come to frequent. Aspects of a city may be revealed to us only as we leave it forever, just as people who have been intimates for many years may glimpse certain aspects of each other only in the moment they part. Remembering the cities we have left, we recall only certain times spent in certain places. Places we almost never think of when we are awake may repeatedly return in our dreams. The most persistent of these are places we did not choose - those of our childhood.

As adults, we have our own reasons for being in one city rather than another. Michel Leiris anguished: 'To be, or not to be. That is not the question which bothers me. To be, or not to be there. To be here, or to be elsewhere. That is the burning question so far as i am concerned.' For most of us, work settles the question. Part of my own work has been in response to invitations to make visual art works in and about cities. One recent invitation stated that the purpose of the commission was to have the invited artist 'leave a trace' in the city. This is not a book of such traces, a pocket edition of the works i have made. On occasions I describe a commission, to indicate what circumstances provoked the otherwise desultory displacements registered here. But my aim is less to record traces I have left in some cities than it is to recall some traces some cities have left in me.

Cities new to us are full of promise. Unlike promises we make to each other, the promise of the city can never be broken. But like the promise we hold for each other, neither can it be fulfilled.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo3535909.html

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7HyjtEQK1PYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=some+cities+burgin&source=bl&ots=WCVXhJNjrN&sig=eHjE64GQivLL-G38h8VmZaFHv28&hl=en&ei=PuxyTeysLIjLsgbV84yEDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false