Visual Narrative: Witnessing a City in Colours

Jacques Derrida, in his 1995 work, Mal d’Archive, spoke about the feverish desire to archive, to record and to preserve. This phrase feels even more urgent now, when everyone with a smartphone has become an archivist of their own life. We photograph to remember, but our memories live in clouds. When we wish to recall a moment, we no longer reach inward but scroll outward like faithful archivists and retrieve data. Sometimes our devices ambush us with “memories” from months or years ago, and we are made to relive what we thought we had already lived enough, in fragmented, decontextualised forms.

In Prague, on a solo work trip, I realised that I did not want to take photographs at all, in spite of the visual allure that the city held for me, and the constant itch to take my phone out and snap everything that I saw, lest I forget. The churches were magnificent, the cobbled streets unfamiliar and quaint, and the Charles Bridge over the Vltava alluring. But what did I want to see? What was I truly witnessing to remember in a not-so-distant future? Could a series of photographs snapped up quickly on my Android phone ever hold the scent of Trdelník sugar, the sound of a violin under Charles Bridge, the sensation of walking without destination or obligation? Would a photograph remember the small miracle of eating alone, or the decision to skip a conference session to watch a school band in action, the sensation of walking on cobbled roads till my feet ached, perhaps the very stones Kafka once walked on?

So, I began to sketch. At first, because I had promised myself I would; later, because I needed to. I sat on sidewalks, on café steps, under awnings, trusting my eyes and my hands, and the limits of my own attention. In sketching, I was not storing data. I was staying in the moment. I was learning to remember.

I spent five days in Prague, and whatever time I could spare from the conference venue, which turned out to be quite a lot, I gave to the city. I hopped on trams and tried the strange, unfamiliar names of the stations on my lips as I heard them over the PA system: Dlouhá třída, Malostranská, Stavovské divadlo, and many more. I walked across the Charles Bridge and watched people playing music, taking photographs of themselves and others, buying and selling colourful metal earrings shaped like birds and cats.

I wandered through alleys that smelled of cinnamon and pistachio and felt as though I had slipped through time when I reached the Golden Lane near Prague Castle. I stopped at house number 22, where Kafka was said to have lived, and thought about how small rooms could hold entire worlds. I read funny signs outside pubs and drifted through both the old and new parts of town with ease.

Once, my phone died and I lost my way in an unfamiliar part of the city. I promptly sat down and sketched my heart out before walking all the way back to my hotel, getting lost a few more times before finding myself again on familiar cobbled streets.

In five days, I lived, and time slowed down for me. I was alone and Prague benefited from my undivided attention to it. Not that the city noticed me of course. But I did.