The Hidden Columns of Rome
A collaboration with Selena Anders
2018 - 2021
photography, black and white negative film
When I settled in Rome I was strongly attracted by the richly ornamented walls inside the Historical city. They are so captivating with all the details and spolia, immersive diversity of embedded ancient remnants, inscriptions, cornices, capitals and columns, decaying frescoes and statues, Madonnellas and catholic plaques. These pieces of Antiquity and Middle Ages aren’t marked by any sign, many of them remain unnoticed and are unfamiliar even to historians.
I focus my work on the columns, because of their active presence on the ground level, closeness to people and interaction with the street life. The columns which mark out the enduring in culture find themselves in the flow of fast-moving changes. Furthermore, I thought that their intriguing diversity in size, style and preservation state deserves to be visually documented. For centuries, ancient columns had been taken out from their original locations and as free enduring structures were incorporated in later buildings. Nowadays, their inconspicuousness in a city that is an open-air museum puts them between posters, signs, vehicles and even garbage bags. Their presence as anonymous, timeless and silent witnesses of history creates an urban expression of the way the past survives and indetectably infiltrates the present world.
Purposefully walking all the streets in the historical city enclosed by the Aurelian Walls since 2018, I have found more than seventy locations marked by unique columns. I made a map and kept visiting them, capturing their appearance in different light and changing flow of urban life. As it is time and not transparency to be considered the main subject of black and white photography, I decided to use black and white film to reveal the distant origin and timelessness of the columns. It let me depict the urban context without emphasising its transient states. I approached the columns in an old-fashioned documentary manner, using 35-mm camera to express my feeling about their unassuming and reticent participation in street life. In this way I could also create homage to the great masters of flâneur’s photography and experience a significant broad layer in history of photography, just as the columns were revealing such layer of history.
In 2019, after an year of work, I had the luck to be kindly advised by Prof. Hendrik Dey, to whom I owe my familiarity with the PhD Thesis of Prof. Selena Anders “Medieval Porticoes of Rome: New Methods and Technologies for Revealing Rome’s Architectural and Urban Heritage”. Her extensive research on the remnant columns, once used as spolia in medieval porticoes and later on closed by walls, shed new light on the locations marked on my map. By this common passion and sharing some urban customs, Selena Anders and me came up with interesting ideas, which are about to be displayed and published.