Mapping imaginary places through world building and AI
Architecture of Desire is a participatory artwork, exploring cities not as fixed architectural entities, but as symbolic and speculative spaces that act as containers for memory, fantasy, longing, and desire. Drawing from literature, visual art, material experimentation, and emerging technologies, the work explores how fictional cities can be built collectively through storytelling and making. Created through co-making workshops as part of the Seniors Art School by Southwark Park Galleries.
Taking Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) as a conceptual and literary starting point, participants engaged with the book’s poetic descriptions of imagined cities, each functioning as a metaphor for human experience. Across the sessions, we read and discussed selected cities from Calvino’s text, using them as prompts to reflect on our own relationships to places we love, remember, dream of, or wish existed.
The artwork is commissioned by Southwark Park Galleries and created through the Seniors Art school programme.
Seniors Art School is funded by Southwark Charities.