mnemonic:
from Greek μνημονικός, "of memory".
Mnemonics relies on tokens ("mnemonic devices") to create associations with whatever is to be remembered. In ancient Rome, a popular method for orators was to remember successions of spaces as one walked through it, and to create associations between these and the points in one´s speech.

metropolis:
from Greek μήτηρ, "mother" and πόλις, "city".
A metropolis is a state of origin and a center of a particular culture.

What place might Cato have recalled - or thought up - when he proclaimed: "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam"?
How are the places of our dreams spatially organized?
The relationship between places and memory was the starting point for an exploration of places which should be in a "somewhere back in your head" way familiar, yet in a "where no man has been before" way new and unfamiliar. The result are memorials without memory and roadside shrines without roads, land art and architectural visions, when appropriate accompanied by passages from Invisible cities by Italo Calvino, Das Schloss by Franz Kafka, and Solaris by Stanislav Lem. Click "next", below, to travel to the mnemonic metropoleis.

Mario Gagliardi, 2006