I walk holding onto my heart and everyone thinks it’s foam rubber. In Las Vegas what is real gets lost in what is false, or maybe what is false is found again in what is real. In the “city of eyes,” what counts is the image in the mirror; if you shoot at me, confetti is released.

Nine cities, infinite voices, no destination. The direction to follow: elsewhere, in a time where “elsewhere” gives way to uniformity.

Tell about the “modern city” and its attractive possibilities, when someone murmurs to you about the misery and fear of the suburbs.

Tell about the “modern city,” nerve center of the economic, social and technological fabric, when someone says to you that your slumber time is what passes between the seven subway stations.

One step away from oblivion, the destruction of the sole possible mediator, your heart is revealed.

Tell about the “modern city,” an uninterrupted building site of dreamlike dances of architecture, while someone reveals to you that on the next continent a thousand others are sitting on the same chair in the same spiral room staring stupidly at the same spongy morsel of chicken.

Tell about the “modern city” and its attempts at sustainable development, when someone points out to you that violated, tired nature guides uprisings and prepares war.

Tell about the “modern city” and realize that it is a container: of girls dancing alone, of shoes forgotten for years, of men who look at the sky and those who lower their head until they implore, of phone booths smashed by a drunk lover whose call wasn’t answered, of first loves that you’ll never forget and genocides you’d like to forget.

The New York nights and its skyline inspire Fritz Lang’s apocalyptic metropolitan visions. One step away from oblivion, the destruction of the sole possible mediator, your heart is revealed.

In 2012, a few years from that imagined scenario, during the giddy voyage of these cities without time or space, where arrival marks departure, the confine overflows into confusion, elements come from everywhere and maybe your son is a Tamagotchi… if you manage to leap off a car of the train as it races along and don’t get hurt, distinguishing again, from a distance, a line, a horizon line whose width is measured in heartbeats: the only possible mediator seems to be, once more, that magnificent generator of electric pulsations.

So then, blindfold your eyes and follow only the frequencies.

You can’t know the cities, you can’t hear them, you can’t see them without an EKG that records their lives. Which ones? All the ones you can. Click.

© Massimo Mastrorillo/Pamela Piscicelli