Palimpsests | Roma

An impossible geography of Rome meant to lay bare an alternative way to make the city readable again through its past and despite it.

/- gr. palímpsestos “scraped again”

(pálin- ‘again’ and a deriv. of psân ‘to scrape’)

Rome is a palimpsest, a stratification of space and time declined in an incalculable number of combinations. A shifting equilibrium, an incessant process of writings and overwritings, of uses and reuses, of voids, traces, splinters, imprints, superfetations.

Despite the gruelling tourist trivialisation and the many so-called public uses of its history, Rome can be taken as an archetype of contemporaneity, much more than as the elective residence of a crystallised, misunderstood, abused antiquity.

Holding a mirror up before Rome is to create the necessary premise for verifying its present, rethinking its imaginary, prefiguring its destiny. Palimpsests intends to restore a multiple form to an idea of an interrupted city, interdicted to the construction of a community, crossed by political and economic wills that deprive space of life and saturate it with commodities.