→ ABOUT
→ WORK
→ Rough Cuts
→ Documenting
Demolition
→ Rags / Stracci
→ A People’s Monument
for Rome
→ CONTACT
for Rome:
May 2025
- “What is Rome? Where is the real Rome? Where does it begin and where does it end? Rome is surely the most beautiful city in Italy, if not the world. But it is also the most ugly, the most welcoming, the most dramatic, the richest, the most wretched…The contradictions of Rome are difficult to transcend because they are contradictions of an existential order. Rather than traditional contradictions, between wealth and misery, happiness and horror, they are part of a magma, a chaos. To the eyes of the foreigner and the visitor, Rome is the city contained within the old Renaissance walls. The rest is a vague, anonymous periphery, unworthy of interest.”
-Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The City’s True Face,” Stories from the City of God, 2003 translation, (pg. 165-166)
This course engaged what poet, film director, artist and political thinker Pier Paolo Pasolini described as the “...vague, anonymous periphery” of Rome. Students had the opportunity to explore the historic center from the inside-out, and also to study the city from the outside (of the walls)-out. Through films of Pasolini (Accattone, 1961, Mamma Roma, 1962, La Ricotta, 1963, etc), selected readings, site visits both within and outside of Rome, and lectures from local architects, activists, and thinkers, students were exposed to an understanding of the city in all of its complex rings and layers.
The course also explored the question of monuments and monumentality within the context of Rome. When is a monument purely a monument and when does infrastructure become a monument? What is a monument in the center of Rome vs. in the periphery and where do these definitions overlap or diverge? How do monuments define public space and how has tourism affected the privatization of monuments in Rome? As previously-public spaces defined by monuments in the center have become ticketed and overcrowded tourist attractions, what and where is the new public in Rome? These questions served as catalysts for a broader discussion of the ownership of public space.