Output details

City changes

City Changes is a text-work for installation comprising a series of 20 framed A4 pages, originally commissioned for the contemporary art biennial Manifesta 7 in Rovereto, Italy, 2008 and since exhibited in seven different UK and international contexts.

The work describes a city whose qualities and appearance is constantly shifting and explores the social and political possibilities of urban space and the diverse narrative, discourse and rhetorical frames that surround and summon it.

Each of the texts (one per A4 page) invokes a city which is described alternately as being in a state of either constant change or complete stasis. Contrasting stability with transformation in this way, the work forms a part of Etchells’ ongoing research investigation, across works in diverse media and forms, into the city itself (as material context and space for living and working) and into its metaphorical status as an index or figure in political, social and psychological discourse.

Working in reference to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), to Etchells’ published fiction Endland Stories (1998) and The Broken World (2008) and to broader currents of utopian and dystopian thought and fiction, Etchells’ text is generated through a set of rules governing its content and composition which aim to foreground the construction and deconstruction of its own arguments. In a highly performative approach to writing – echoing the processural compositional systems developed by Oulipo, John Cage and William Burroughs – each text in City Changes is made by rewriting, reversing and countering the previous one in the sequence. Exposing and archaeologising the act of writing itself, such that new words introduced on any new page are colour coded, the work charts the ebbs, flows and decisions of its own editing, at the same time creating portraits of a series of 20 possible (and impossible) urban spaces.