PASSI. PALAZZO ALTEMPS, ROME

“Passi (a work realized elsewhere before) finds an ideal placing in Palazzo Altemps, sharing the same ideas, the same subjects, the same perceptions offered by the space that embraces it: a vision of fragments, that time makes independent of each other but in a close vision and a noisy, at times annoying clamor in the background. In my work, the sound of the mirror shattering under the visitors’ feet, in the museum, the sound of the past, made of screams, of iron against iron, of people singing wildly and glances lost in a verse of a poem. The work is installed along the entrance to the museum, on the top of the steps called “loggia meridionale” (south loggia), a long narrow passage like a telescope over the courtyard on the right side, opposed to the “loggia settentrionale” (north loggia), on the other side of the courtyard. Through the work, the walking distance between the first and the second entrance to the museum rooms prepares the visit, clearing the glance of those who enter and putting their perceptions in an infinite broken space, like the one that awaits them at the end of the crossing. My intention is to create a space that produces a visual surprise for which the awareness of knowing the history and all the matters we confront – the culture …- is not enough to exhaust our amazement: defenseless spectators of the past pinned on a future that cracks under our own weight”.

Alfredo Pirri, from an interview with Ludovico Pratesi   

To watch the videos of Alvin Curran’s performance and the sound composition of Polisonum click here