Invisible Cities

A striking red illuminated sculpture made of stacked geometric forms glows in a city square at night, set against the iconic Royal Liver Building and surrounding historic architecture. The artwork's reflective surfaces create a vivid contrast with the dark sky and warmly lit waterfront skyline.

About Invisible Cities

The Invisible Cities is an artwork that celebrates and brings light to the multi-faceted and socially layered fabric of our cities. The way that we each interpret the communities, cities and greater environments that we inhabit is vastly contrasting from person to person.

The local, born and raised within a 20 kilometre radius, the city is familiar, home, conform and safety. The immigrant, the city is a place of newness, excitement, adventure and a new start.

The student, the city is a place of hustle, exploration, learning and enquiry. While our interpretations and experiences change our perception of place, we can never truly understand another’s experience of the same place.

Invisible Cities is an artwork that celebrates the space in between, the holes in experience, the windows into another’s life and the tapestry of layered experience that exists within the metropolitan world.

Constructed from rolled and shaped, sheet-aluminium, the artwork is designed to be light-weight, modular and adaptable. The brushed surface of each module diffuses light gently across the curvatures that make up the artwork, allowing the gentle gradient of colour to blend and dance across the form.

When arranged together, the 4 modules create an immersive space that encapsulates the audience within the artwork. As the audience traverses through the piece, they are immersed within a curated experience of sound, form and light.

Easy Read Description

Invisible Cities is an artwork about the different ways people experience a city. For some, it is home. For others, it is a place to explore, learn or start a new life. Walk through the artwork to see changing colours, shapes and sounds, and think about how other people experience the world.

Location

Pier Head North

What Three Words: ///issues.rungs.cape

Sustainability Information

A key fabrication material of the artwork is aluminium. Aluminium can be infinitely recycled, to this end they have ensured that the treatment of the artwork skin does not have any treatment (powder coating etc.) and is raw, ready to be recycled at the end of the artwork's life.

The durable materiality means that the work can be toured almost infinitely in the future. LED lights are used to illuminate the artwork.

About Atelier Sisu

Peruvian artist, Renzo B. Larriviere (1985) and Australian artist, Zara Pasfield (1995), founded Atelier Sisu in 2020, after years of collaboration as independent artists, in the medium of experiential sculpture.

Atelier Sisu focuses on the intersection of art and architecture through the medium of large-scale temporary architectures. While all scales of art influences how we may experience a space, the confined parameters of a museum or a gallery are not always the best environment in which to exhibit traditional bodies of work. Rather, the public realm is where Sisu is able to realise these ephemeral environments that push the boundaries of conventional Art and Spaces, and embed it into the fabric of a city and its community.

Working in the context of public spaces, Atelier Sisu is bringing art into the everyday, and into the public realm; bridging the gap between cultural institutions and quotidian spaces. Evoking and engaging emotional connections, openness and inclusiveness through their Public Art practice, Atelier Sisu’s work reimagines how we experience the spaces we inhabit, and, through abstract forms, illumination and sound scapes, creating vibrant sculptural and spatial experiences for the audience to explore in an architectural scale.

Find out more about Atelier Sisu

Accessibility Information

A detailed description of Invisible Cities' soundscape for those who are hearing impaired.

Invisible Cities is accompanied by a bespoke soundscape. Characterised by mechanical, technological sounds in rhythmic beats, the audio enhances the illuminated atmosphere around the artwork. Distorted vocal effects singing ‘light flicker’ can be heard throughout the track.