Rome Twice Removed

Roma… Rom… Rome… the eternal city has so many names but they never conjure up the same image. I was born and grew up in Rome, yet, like everybody else, my memories and knowledge of the city are altered by narratives that are not my own. Our knowledge of Rome is enhanced, modified, corrupted and distorted by our access to so many portrayals of the city made by a multitude of authors, scholars and amateurs. The image of Rome that people have is built up with layers upon layers of clichés, fictional characters, media representations and tourist snapshots.

I can contextualize each image used, I can recognize the places and the monuments, but these are not my experience of the city, these are somebody else’s memories. These ‘artificial’ memories compete with my memories of Rome creating a new place that I miss, at times, more than the real Rome of my past. The distortion and deterioration of these images was generated while reshooting the images off of a computer screen. The sound was grabbed from multiple Italian television programs and layered into a jumbled commentary of the images. The resulting video is a cacophony of distorted representations of Rome and garish sounds that poetically represent my understanding of that city. Dystopian or idyllic I do not know it is for the viewer to decide.