projects

A Question of Time

I leave the city through the Porta San Sebastiano and head south on a clear day on which the “Castelli” are perfectly defined. Other places that I know well: the Cartiera Latina and the Almone river, which I managed to see before it was rerouted underground in the 1960s; the Quo Vadis church, which made me laugh when I learned its translation as a child, unlike the terror that the catacombs in front of it always aroused in me; and the beautiful Appian Way that proceeds from it. Everything is incredible, even for someone who has seen it many times. I don’t know why, but my favourite place is still the Villa of the Quintilii and its less monumental entrance from the old Appian Way. During the days that I spent at the photographic archive of the American Academy in Rome I was dazzled by the “perfection” of Anderson’s photograph. When I arrived at the villa, a combination of the beauty of the place, the light, the wind and the memory of Anderson’s photo triggered a strange hint of Stendhal’s syndrome in me: it’s too beautiful, perhaps I’ll leave. I can’t find a key, I don’t understand, but I manage to recover my calm, perhaps because I lie on the ground. Yes, lying on the ground and observing the site through the nature that had survived the summer is pleasant and causes me a strange joy. As is often the case in Rome, one chances upon entirely surreal moments: I walk seeking a vision, I lie on the ground and a low-flying helicopter appears, keeping watch over a background noise (whistles, car horns, wailing sirens and squealing tyres) – it’s Colonel Gaddafi’s  retinue, on its way home via Ciampino airport. The sound soon dies down and the age-old silence returns to the Villa, accompanied by the wind. I think of Anderson’s photograph again, so beautiful and so close today. In 1999 I had taken four photographs at the Villa of the Quintilii. I had subsequently thrown two away, but I remember that I liked the other two. I clearly remember a wall that completely filled the first photo, but my memory of the second was rather vague. When I got back to my studio I had another look at the photographs that I had just taken, but I forgot to search for those taken in 1999. Two days later I decided to work on just two new photographs, I corrected the colours and then looked for the two old photographs. The one that I hadn’t been able to remember was surprising and appears a sort of remote foreshadow of my “Nature Bianche” work that underlies the new photograph taken at the Villa of the Quintilii. Here is a new short circuit: Anderson’s photo, nature (with the wind, which played a vital role in the “Nature Bianche” series), walking at the Villa of the Quintilii and taking the new photograph and then returning to my studio and finding an old photograph taken in the same place eleven years earlier, which is a direct precursor of this latest work. All of this is a little concentrate of the spirit of the work at the American Academy in Rome.
September 2010

 

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Villa Quintili