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About
M-city in a (the) first place is a play with the form and space of the city, played on the walls, posters, billboards, stickers and in the virtual world. All of the pieces of M-city - there is about 100 of them - were made as stencils. The first step of preparation is a sketch of a given building on the A4 paper. Such drawing is being drawn in isometric perspective and inscribed into a couple of cubes one on top of the other. Thanks to such a technique printing the stencil is much easier, moreover it allows printing a single fragment of the building. All of the buildings can be joined in multiple ways with author's imagination as the only limit. It's easy to customise the buildings by mixing the roofs and elevations - parts of different stencils. All of the objects have a brighter left face and a darker right face which adds them the depth and vividness. After the sketch is done it's being enlarged to A2 format and laminated on both sides. The late guarantees long-term resilience of the stencil, proofing it against absorption of the paint. As the layers of the paint get too thick it's easy to tear them down and use the stencil again (some of the stencils were used hundreds of times). Finally the stencil is being cut out. The printing itself does not appear to be much of a problem. It's important to begin printing from the bottom of the project, as the foreground must be printed first (it would be impossible to print it later avoiding permeation of previously printed stencils). Obviously it's possible to use masks and retouches but it makes the work much more toilsome. Before printing the project is very general and limited to the outline of the city, possibly zoning the space into industrial, public, living etc. areas. The streets and buildings planning is never being done, it comes to life during the printing as the work goes on. The inspiration to the architecture of M-city came mostly from the architecture of Threecity (Gdansk, Sopot, Gdynia, Baltic coast, north of Poland) and it's surroundings, but there's no avoiding of motifs from other regions of Poland. The architecture of the town is in a sense a promotion of groups of people who work together for society. These include independent media, charities, non-governmental organisations, off theatres etc. Most of the project realisations are on especially chosen walls and matching the historical or architectural context of the surroundings. People on the stencils are mostly author's friends or people involved in some local social activity. One person created most of the Cities, the biggest ones although were the opportunity for friends and sometimes occasional bystanders to help the author paint. Such meetings had an atmosphere of a picnic, most of the helpers were at least a bit introduced to a stencil technique, and the technique itself is not a demanding one. It's enough to have imagination and a drive for creation, and one can be very creative at work with stencils. What's interesting is that unconsciously people often tend to create their own town/district - people living in blocks of flats tend to paint b.o.f., people from villas tend to build villas, people from around the port will surely picture the port etc. The same refers to the figures appearing in the Cities - they seem to have a story on their own. At www.m-city.org you can find an interactive application for constructing the cities on your own, from the same elements as were used in the real world. The constructor came to life to prolong the life of Cities when they cease existing in the real world. Up to date Cities were built in: Threecity, Warsaw, Bydgoszcz, Toruń and Poznań. Contact
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