‘‘[…] setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them.’’
—‘Invisible Cities’, Italo Calvino

‘‘Historic centres – veritable reservoirs of ideological and symbolic elements – have become theme parks, to the point of giving a name to a new phenomenon, Disneyfication, in which the collective memory is absent and tourism has pushed out the previously existing model of social relations.’’
—Camerin, 2016

‘‘[...] The light of the future doesn't, even for a second, stop wounding us: it is here to brand us in all our everyday actions, with anxiety, even in the trust that gives us life.’’
—‘Il pianto della scavatrice’, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1956

‘‘What did August Sander tell his sitters before he took their pictures? And how did he say it so that they all believed him in the same way?
Did he simply say that their photographs were going to be a recorded part of history?
And did he refer to history in such a way that their vanity and shyness dropped away?’’
—‘About Looking’, John Berger

‘‘He observed how strangely the people standing in a row with their figures bent slightly forward and their clothes plastered by the wind to the shape of their bodies resembled naked statues. On their pedestal of earth they looked unfamiliar and noble.’’
—‘The Voyage Out’, Virginia Woolf, 1915

‘‘[Memory] is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.’’
—‘Excavation and Memory’, Walter Benjamin

‘‘There is no other origin for beauty than the wound, one distinctive and different for each of us and hidden or visible, which we all bear within us’’
—Jean Genet

‘‘They offered me the office, offered me the shop
They said I’d better take anything they’d got
Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?
Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a cop?

Career opportunity the one that never knocks
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock.’’
—‘Career Opportunities’, The Clash

‘‘I am a monster, do you say? No! I am the people! I am an exception? No! I am the rule; you arethe exception! You are the chimera; I am the reality!’’
—Gwynplaine, ‘The Man Who Laughs’, Victor Hugo

They aren’t invisible, they are clearly seen. Behind the magnificent city of Barcelona, they are found in the hotels, bars and restaurants, cleaning, cooking and caring for customers. They are in the parks looking after children and walking with the elderly, in offices, hospitals, schools and colleges, delivering mail, driving public transport, working in banks, shops, at supermarket tills, in the kitchens of workplaces, and in industrial factories hidden between mountains.

‘‘If the themes sometimes blur, they only recur somewhat later, all the more clearly, virtually identical. Yet these repetitions, these tiny variations, halts, regressions, can give rise to modifications—though barely perceptible—eventually moving quite far from the point of departure.’’
—Alain Robbe-Grillet

‘‘The photographer must turn the facsimile precision of appearances that characterises the camera into a metaphor for other imprecise, dense, secret languages that link the dimensions of time and space, the imaginary and the real in things.’’
—Nelly Schnaith