Matthew Picton's Urban Narratives. Or how a three-dimensional paper map can beam you into the London bombing nights of 1940

The first impression is a delicate paper city with a river. Homes and blocks of houses formed from printed pages. The buildings are open at the top, the words and the text fragments unfold inside, in stylish typography, with some passages in capital letters, most of them clearly legible: ‘Like lost souls leaking’, ‘Fear’, ‘Germany’s full force’, ‘the last of sunset’, ‘safety curtain’ ... . But the most striking are its burnt, scorched parts. A paper city badly destroyed by fire: what a powerful image. If you have not already guessed, the title of the four-part work (4 panels) provides the information about the place and time: ‘London 1940’. The dimensions: 37′′×30′′. Picton’s sculptural maps are so fascinating and so convincingly prepared as allusive reliefs that one is literally sucked into them. Suddenly, you undertake a psychogeographical trip walking through dark, unlit street canyons with illuminated façades on both sides. The walls have become huge projection surfaces with man-sized letters telling place-based stories. The sentences drive you from house to house, street to street in a fantastic walkable narrated space.