7. City Burns - James Lortnoc

City Burns is a project that’s not necessarily a place where stories about cities are told. It’s mostly a place where stories about people and their cities are told, with no apparent sense to them the majority of the time.

You can ask yourself: why focus on a theme ever so present in contemporary society in such a direct manner? Wouldn’t that be useless? It’s a legitimate question and the answer to that may possibly just be a very simple ‘yes’. Yes, probably it is useless. But it’s exactly because those stories are ever so present in our current youth – and maybe because they are indeed so common – that makes it interesting to observe a generation that is mostly influenced by the cities it comes across, rather than a country, a region or any other geographic or cultural unit. Cities, and the evermore easier connections between them, assume a core place for this generation – a generation that emerges with great strength not only in this new Europe, but just about everywhere. A global generation, urban and nomad, made out of people profoundly marked by the places they live in.

This is what really interests me and hence the reason why this project exists. I do not, however, want to create any kind of manifesto that imposes esthetical rules or too rigid themes to the work I will be publishing here. After all, even I do not really know what all this will be. What I do know is that it’s something unfinished and, hopefully, will always require finishing.

See more of Lortnoc's work HERE and check out his Diary HERE