Eden Chahal

How can a film be a city instead of drawing a representation of it?

A Tale of 10.000 cities is a script that generates many possible movies written with code, sound and architecture about human experiences of inhabiting cities. The spectator never sees the main protagonist, instead they discover them through their perception of the built environment and a voice-over narration of one of a thousand tales.The narrative structure is common to all, with infinite variations. Architecture is used as a material, an alphabet with which a language is constructed. Code is incorporated into the structure of the stories, it becomes its grammar. This project is about what happens when a language is hybridised with another. The video installation is a spatial translation of the project, an extension of its logic. In the space you are about to enter two cities are facing each others. You will never visit the city of the person seating next to you.

Before completing an MFA in Computational Arts at the University of Goldsmiths, Eden was trained in architecture in Paris and Madrid. Instead of building the physical environment, her practice now focuses on constructing narrative tools, with cities as a subject and space as a material. She investigates human experiences of inhabiting places, to answer the question: what remains of architecture when it becomes a memory? With writing at its core, her work matches diverse techniques and media to imagine new tools by combining fixed and moving images, spatial and sound installations, physical computing, interactive fictions, XR.