In spring this year, European pigeons must have thought humans were extinct; people’s disappearance from urban spaces due to the coronavirus would have confused animals normally fighting for scraps. The quiet was a rare opportunity to observe urban spaces without crowds, and envisage a potential future where humans no longer have dominion over the environment, where nature would encroach on ruins as the planet healed and evidence of grand human constructions gradually crumbled into dust.
This essay pairs short extracts from longer poems with quiet cityscapes. Texts preceded images, sometimes by decades, but when juxtaposed they become complementary, illustrating cities at rest, leading the imagination on metaphysical tangents – through empty city squares and into crumbling structures and recesses of the mind.
