Mariam Ghani “The City & The City”

RYAN LEE

[Image: Mariam Ghani "The City & The City: Mill Creek Valley" (2015)]

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RYAN LEE presents The City & The City by Brooklyn-based artist Mariam Ghani. Shot in St. Louis in 2014-15, primarily during the month of protests known as “Ferguson October,” The City & The City, which premiered at the St. Louis Art Museum in 2015, comprises a 29-minute film based loosely on China Miéville’s 2009 sci-fi noir novel of the same name, a series of photographs shot in locations significant to the urban development of St. Louis, a multichannel sound piece developed with residents of the city and county, and an online project published by Triple Canopy.

Miéville’s novel describes a city so divided that it has become two separate countries. This is an extreme version of a familiar condition: many of us live in cities within cities, only occasionally crossing into each other’s territories. The city-states of The City & The City are, however, still geographically cross-hatched together, so the citizens maintain their separation by unseeing everything and everyone that belongs to the other city: a fiction that becomes a fact. In Ghani’s film, this conceptual framework is mapped onto real places and histories of St. Louis, which allows her to both textually underline and visually collapse the actual divisions between City and County, North and South. The film, like the book, begins with a murder, and uses the investigation into that murder to reveal, question, and eventually unravel the systems and structures that made both the murder and the city’s divisions possible. Unlike the book, the film is narrated by the dead man, who appears onscreen only as a series of shattered mirrors, a reference to the mirrored coffin carried by protesters that October. The film is haunted throughout not only by his absence, but by the absence of anyone who could even stand in for him.