One month after I left Rome I am now closing down my project. It finishes in London, the place where it started.
For the ocassion I thought to write this last post while having dinner at the Colosseo restaurant in Victoria Street, enjoying some fettuccine. Apart of Coliseum-Absence there are other things I miss from Rome.

Once there I thought that was better to go for the Colosseo Pizza.

 It was not an oval pizza as expected, but was okay. It contains a lot of parma ham, something I found interesting as Spaniard. I wonder if the pizzaiolo got inspiration of the ingredients of the pizza considering the similarity the map of the building has with the shape of the pizza.

At the end of the residency I decided to leave Rome by a snail transportation system, like I did to get there. I got the ferry at Civitaveccia to Barcelona. This brochure was a good welcome present by the crew of the ship.

Can it be more suggestive? I did not visit the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona though, and I did not avoid to visit it. At this point if I am not visiting a landmark on a city it looks like if I have secret creative reasons for it. No,  just lack of time and interest.

As the Coliseum was further and further I could see more clear what last days happened. I wrote a lot in the ferry, most of it can be read in the previous posts.

But what it has meant in my perception of art, my work and myself, it is going to take more time. A good heading moral of the project would be for me this one:

All reduction of the artistic to cultural reality is a denial of desiresays Jean Francois Lyotard. Applying reverse logic I would say that denial of cultural reality to art is a celebration of desire.

Desire of knowledge about the building and the city
Desire of knowing about my self
Desire of new emotions
Desire of testing new limits
Desire of new occasions of experimenting the idea of death
Desire of reconsider my conceptions about art
Desire of desiring and
desire of controlling my desire.

This is my 8 months collection of Coliseum paraphernalia

This project has been the right tool to achieve what it was proposed when I went there: to survive the city as a contemporary artist. My desire has been fulfilled and I finished my stay victorious.

It is going to be hard to find another Coliseum. Since I saw it crying and sleepless I roam, cruelly pricked by the thorn,
Neither the warmth of the daylight nor the cool darkness of night helps

This is the last piece of the puzzle.

The previous posts were written on the ferry from Rome to Barcelona.  While I am writing the conclusion post of the Colossal Blog I saw on the news that an espectacular fire has started in Rome. It happened on a storage of tires, which are especially smoky.

Gregor passed yesterday by Piazza Venezia and took this picture.

The smoke column is coming from the back of the Coliseum, from Via Apia, but it looks like if the builiding is burning. O perhaps as if the whole arena is used for the fireplace of an enormous summer barbecue.

It gives me a slight thrill of “scorched earth”, as if as much as Rome has been erased of my mind and ticked out, it has also physically disappeared.

This project has got a lot from me and I am not going to get rid of it so easily.
Like one month ago, when I went to Venice for the Biennial. I was visiting the Irish Pavilion, which is in a third floor and when I was climbing the stairs the alarm automatically activated and I started feeling the need of avoiding windows, until I realised that there is no building in Venice, however tall, from which you can see the Coliseum.

It is like if I got some functions of my body with atrophy, after not using it for so long. Or even better: now the project is finished and I am still affected by it, like the people who have got a leg amputated still feeling it.

When I did If Alive, a FX make up artist made me look like 65 by applying latex in my face. I got of my wrinkles for a day to make some portraits in costume. At the end of the day I removed the latex and went to sleep. Next morning, I STILL HAD the wrinkles!! I might look not 65, but perhaps something like 55 or so. Apparently the skin has scarce memory and took sometime for it to remember how was its shape before the pressure. The day after I was back to normal, and I looked only 2 days older than the day before the shooting.

These days after the event, still I felt in an emergency state when I was approaching an area that ussed to be dangerous, or I was unconsciously avoiding looking in the direction of the Coliseum while in the terrace of the academy. I guess I still will have some dreams in which I am depressed because I have seen it unexpectedly.

To get such an obsession with the Coliseum is not surprising. As I said, the builidng is everywhere in the city. Here are some more examples that appeared in latest days in Rome.

Poster in the street

Milk packaging. The two cans are the type of coffee we served chilled in the event

Logo for a cab company.

I do not know how long it would take my mind to get into their normal state, the state before this behaviourist techniques were used on me, if this ever happen, if the damage has not been permanent.

In my 1995 trip around USA I already talked about, I visited Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field. On that occasion I learned something that has been with me for long time and that it has been applied fully in the making of The Colossal Blog.

Lightning Field is in a remote area of the dessert in New Mexico, a place where the rate of electric storms is the highest in the United States. To visit it you have to book a place to stay in a cabin located in front of the work, by calling to a New York phone number, in the DIA Art Foundation. Only 6 people can stay in the cabin each night, and you can only see the work if you stay at least one night, so the trip was planned around the dates that there were rooms available. I was with an escort who helped me with all the arrangements.

We flew to Phoenix, Arizona, and we rented a car to arrive to Quemado, a very small village faraway from main roads. The instructions were to find a two story building next to the gas station and wait there at midday. We did not know what was going to happen, so the scene was similar to that of North by Northwest in which Cary Grant is in a crossroad in the dessert and looks each car approaching as the possible contact for his mission.

Many cars came, even one drive by two people in our same circumstances, looking forward to see the Fields. We looked at them with interrogation face. After an enough extended while a four wheels drive came and a young lady ask us if we were for the art work.
We get into her car and left ours there. She drove as for 30 minutes through each time smaller roads until a very rough path of stones. She was smoking, chewing gum and drinking cocacola at the same time, while explaining interesting safety things about the possibility of being bite by a snake or having a power cut and be isolated in the desert. Then we saw the cabin and the work and remained there overnite.

The work consists in 100 poles, lightning conductors, situated geometrically in a vast prairie surrounded by mountains. The installation is at its most when lightning hit one of the poles.

I stayed the whole night waiting for a lightning and, I want to believe, it was one at dawn. There was a beautiful moment when the sun raised and the rays hit the pointy top of the poles and the field was spread of 100 sparks. It was a very magical experience I will never forget, to be there, to wait, to feel the desert and the art.

But then, how it could be other way? After so much expectation, so much time and energy employed, everything was set to be ready for magic. I stay the whole night up because I was winded up to do it. I put a lot of credit on de Maria, that could be justified or not. He put real pressure on the visitors, of the “take it or leave it” type. My trust was paid back, if not by de Maria work, by my own enthusiasm. It was the investment in the work what made the work special.

The moral of the story in relation with the Colossal blog is clear. It was an important moment for me, and also for the people who attend, especially for the energy accumulated on it and the trust we put in the project.

By a nice chance, on the 1st of July, when I came back home after seeing the Coliseum and I draw the curtains, a big storm was getting ready. I never saw so many lightning in my life. I think is lightning credit I got since the visit to New Mexico, that realised benefits in that day. Some of the lightning pointed the Coliseum in the landscape of my recuperated window.

This one is a perfect hit of the Coliseum:

Frames from HD video. No photoshop amendments.

On the first day I was very tired and many of the things I felt about the building were provoked or enhanced by the weariness. Some of them repeated during the three days after, my three latest days in Rome, and also I had some new feelings and ideas.

- First, the volume. As Goethe said, the building does not fit in one’s mind. You are all the time thinking in one size that actually is smaller than the one you perceive when looking at it again so, in a way, each gaze is a source of confusion. George Simmel writes about the volume and incomprehensible mass of the Alps as the key elements for which the experience of them is so similar to the artistic experience. He analyse how different however are this two experiences, especially for the reason that the Alps are not an human construction intended to arouse aesthetic experiences. Unlike the Alps, the Coliseum is an human construction, but it is a ruin and, as Simmel says “the charm of a ruin consists in the fact of an human deed is perceived as if it was result of nature.

- The space of the city around the Coliseum has changed for me: The monument to Vittorio Emmanuel is smaller now. The attraction of the void that wants to be filled in that has marked my knowledge of the city during this time, has been substituted now by the attraction of a gravitational mass. In my perception now the Coliseum is the kernel that keeps all the pieces together.

- The first day, when I saw it from via Labicana, I thought that the Coliseum had been photoshoped there, just cut and pasted. The tiredness collaborated to the feeling, but I have experienced it again the days after and I think this perception is due to:

○ It is like a Gulliver, out of proportion. There is not a later building in the area that can compete with it. Perhaps if San Giovanni Laterano or the Vatican where closed, this feeling were not so strong.
○ The materials are very diverse and new around it. I would say that the Coliseum is remarkably homogeneous object in the way it looks. Of course the cars and traffic lights do not collaborate very much to its integration in the landscape.
○ As a result of the problems of determining the scale at first sight, you tend to feel it is closer than actually is. The amount of air (mist) you have to look through is different on Him than in other buildings that seem to be in the same range (even if they are closer). This make it look like belonging to a different picture.

- But apart of these size matters what confuses me more is what, after couple of days of suffering it, I discover and named as the “Two speed tourist syndrome (TSTS)”. I think is something very few people, perhaps nobody has experienced before in relation to the Coliseum. The syndrome consists in the shock produced by the encounter in your mind of two sensations that is not possible to hold together:

○ the one that I am a resident of Rome, who knows the name of the street, the shops, restaurants and gelateria, who has several routines that make me settle here, who knows pretty well the structure and the history of the city
○ the other of the tourist who just arrived, and is seeing the main monument for the first time, who has to hurry up to see the tourist attraction in three days, before he leaves the city to back home.

The collision of these two ideas makes me to think alternatively: 1- that it is not possible that I have been so long in Rome and I haven’t see the Coliseum and  2- that I am not actually seeing it, kind of “I cannot trust my eyes”.

My first picture of the Coliseum, now that I am a tourist.

On that day, already 13.00, I came back home and open the curtains that have been closed for 8 months.

It feels very much as if something is starting, like when politicians draw the curtains in a hospital, school, monument or other public building, but actually was the “inaugural moment of the end”.

I was excited to see if the Coliseum was visible from the window, as there were different opinions about it. I couldn’t check until this final day. And yes, it is visible. The window of the academy that has the best view over the city has been closed for a reason: it has not been a complete waste, just a relative one.

Few hours before the event, a friend sent me a message with the title of this post that, however threatening it might look, I find it very encouraging.

The main feature of this event was, certainly, the calibration of the change that it was going to happen in me, and the friends who attend, in the moment I opened the eyes, a moment that cannot not be rewinded.

As minimum and imperceptible was the change in the factual world, as strong and relevant became in the realm of signs and significance. Like the person before and after receiving a cancer diagnosis, nothing has changed but everything is else.

In Ringu the characters of the film are doomed when watch a mysterious video tape that is passed secretly from hand to hand. Once you have seen it, sooner or later, you will die (I do not want to be a party pooper, but anyway this is something that, until further developments in medical science, happens with absolutely EVERY videotape and viewer in the world).

It is the act of viewing something what kills you, something that you cannot erase from your retina, not even pulling your eyeballs out, as Oedipus did.

 The act of seeing the Coliseum for the first time is irreversible, so it contains death on it. It is something that it is going to be broken and it will not be fixed never again. This happens with all the inaugural moments. Art is experienced in one’s life like a necklace in which each pearl is a inaugural moment. Now these days, after so much frantic consume of experiences, after an already long artist life, inaugural moments are really scarce, so it is convenient to delay the few we can achieve and give them space and time to grow in importance. Toward an economy of inaugural experiences.

There was one moment in History in which somebody saw the Coliseum for the first time, and he couldn’t be accompanied by people how have seen it (as I did) because NOBODY had seen it before. It is not easy to determine which was this moment in which the building became “the” building (more for conceptual fuzziness than for History studying difficulties) but for sure that moment existed.

In this event everybody had seen it before they came but, as some of the attendees told me, they felt also as if it was the first time they saw it.

It might have been the time of the day, the excitement I communicated, the collection of pointers towards the building I set up… Some people saw the building through my eyes and experienced in one art event a condensation of the emotions that I had during the eight months. And art object that reflect an intense art experience of the artist is for me the perfect art object.

The sunrise in front of the building was very special. Everything was very quiet, there were not cars, not people coming from parties or going to work. The activity started very slowly after 7 am when also some of the people attending had to leave.

Here there are the people who stay

The light was softly orange and started hitting the building from the left and was invading the whole old façade.
Once the process finished, around 7 am, we started a tour around the building, as I have done blindfolded couple of times in the days before.
This is a picture taken in the place in which Fie took my portrait few days ago.

Then we went to a café to wait until 8.30, the time the Coliseum opens to public.
At 8.15 was already a little queue. I was able to get my ticket for free.

I found the exterior is more impressive than the interior. We walked all the interior corridor but with the tiredness, the sun already hitting strongly and the geometrical increase of tourists make us to short the visit. This ruin has a bit of a big dead animal and walk in the interior is a bit like staying in a mess of broken organs.

 
An all areas pass for the Paul McCarney concert.

The event of the day was finish and it only left to get the promised bath.

The first hours were of comparison of my mental image and the real one. There were several mismatches I will write about, but I need some more time for realise it.

I appreciate very much that Jaume, Ingrid, Ana, Fernando, Sarra, Manuela, Marko, Alessandro, Leonora, Eugenia, Barbara, Wolfgang and Gregor came at this hour and share the moment with me.

“It is no fiction, but plain, sober, honest Truth to say: so suggestive and distinct is it at this hour: that, for a moment -actually in passing in- they who will, may have the whole great pile before them, as it used to be, with thousands of eager faces staring down into the arena, and such a whirl of strife, and blood, and dust, going on there, as no language can describe. Its solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter desolation, strike upon the stranger the next moment, like a softener sorrow; and never in his life, perhaps, will he be so moved and overcome by any sight not immediately connected with on affections and afflictions”
DICKENS, C., Pictures from Italy, 1877

In the very moment I opened the eyes everything changed. Few days have already passed and I am still evaluating what are my feelings about it, what I am experiencing as a result of the release of the pressure I put on my during the the 8 months. I am writing about and my notes will come soon, but the very first thing to feel after I opened the eyes is that I have projected the Coliseum out of my mind.

Some months ago I wrote the post  37- Operative Centres in which I remembered when I was trouble about metaphysics and the idea of the disappearance of the absolute centre and the need of operative centres, that you can take with you everywhere, that you can create your own spaces in relation with them.

At that time I asked a collaboration with a Fátima de Burnay a hat designer from Madrid, to see if we create a hat that could be a Coliseum I can take with me, on the top of my head, so I do not need to stay around the original, not physically, neither mentally.

Apart of my two “Metaphysics of Training”

I sent 3 Chiricos as inspirational images

The other night, after I saw the building for the first time, I saw also saw for the first time the hat she designed, that just arrived that day from Madrid.
It is very elegant and discreet. It shows the Coliseum in a subtle way.

Once I have seen the Coliseum I can take it out of my head. I can bring it wherever I like because I have full control over it.

I just want to thank everybody for being here. Especially people who came from abroad, of course, friends from London. My colleagues at the Academy, Fernando, the secretary, and friends from Rome who are here tonight. I want to thank specially Ana, who has helped me so much, all these months, being my eyes when walking around the building.

And I think is something I want to be especially thankful to all of you because it is so ridiculous to come here just for me to open the eyes. To wake up so early, and people who come from faraway, and such an expectation for something so insignificant, so simple, as me open the eyes, I am very touched.

I think there is something unimportant and ridiculous in this event but I know that the person who I am now and the person who am going to be in few minutes will be a different person. I do not know exactly why, I do not know what is going to happen. Nothing physical is going to happen, maybe nothing psychological or emotional, but I am going to be completely different. And I think the people who came, all of you, is because you know something different is happening, and it is in the realm of the signs and the language and the meaning of things, so this is an event for artists and people who work with language and with the significance of things.

I think I have accumulated a lot of energy, symbolic energy, these months, walking covering my eyes, or in the bus or maybe just walking backwards some times, odd things… and all this energy I put it in this event, is going now to pay back. And all these moments are going to vanish, the energy is going to dissipate, and that’s why we are all here. So thanks very much and let’s see what happen.

The day before I arrived late to the Mercure Hotel in Via Labicana, near the building. I went by myself, to concentrate like a matador the day before the bullfight. I took a taxi and look away when we passed next to the building. I left the taxi and crossed the street by hearing, as I was not able to look back to see if cars were coming. I wait for silence and crossed the street without looking.

The 1st of July started at 4.00 am. I wait for few minutes at the   the hotel. It was good to sleep in a different environment, close to the location, and have sometime to think.

Here I am in front a the lobby. Very peculiar moment of excitement.
Alessandro was the first on arriving. He was going to record the event in video. Many of the images are going to be captured frames from his recording.
And few minutes after him, two cars with my pals of the academy who also were bringing the stuff for the breakfast.

I got into the car and we passed next to the Coliseum toward the location.

Here I am getting out  of the car

And then waiting for the people to arrive and for the breakfast to be ready

Things are getting ready in the back.

The guests are coming around me. I am going to give a speech.

Right before open the eyes

The very moment

Fascination.

It’s done. The day, though, went very much longer.

It has happened and things will be not the same again (even if perhaps not very different).
The Colossal Project sped up the last few days until yesterday’s final event.
I do not know still clearly what has changed but I am elaborating new posts to show once again my doubts and confusion, this time about the fact (and from the point of view) of having seen it already. Keep tuned.

We came to the Colosseum at twilight. Once one has seen it, everything else seems small. It is so huge that the mind cannot retain its image; one remembers it as smaller than it is, so that every time one returns to it, one is astounded by its size. 11 November 1786 (J. W. Goethe’s Italienische Reise (Italian Journey).

I thought to publish this quote and get it out of the way so then I can get my own impression.

I read the book recommended by Jaime at the beginning of the blog. It is this one.

It is a log of the trip that Carol Dunlop and Julio Cortazar did through the Paris Marseille motorway trying to cover the distance in one month, extremely slow, stopping in all the break areas. There are many similarities with this Colossal blog. They take very seriously something kind of ridiculous and they use the system in the reverse way that it is intended to, as in my projects.

In the log they tell stories related to the motorway, little anecdotes of daily life in the road, quotes of books and films. The lack of Internet in that time makes much dry their narration.

There is a moment in which they play with the idea that the whole log is a fiction, that they never left Paris, as I did in my blog, suggesting that I have seen the building many times.

I was interested specially in how they leave the motorway, in which way they trick the payment agents at the end, but they are very unspecific about this. They only say that at the gates they pretend the ticket was lost.  And about the feeling, that it was somehow “sad”.

This is the last line of the summary Wikipedia does of the 1954 Françoise Sagan novel Bonjour Tristesse: Cécile and her father return to the empty, desultory life they were living before Anne interrupted their summer.

I know that on the 1st everything will be thrilling, to wait for the sun and then for the opening of the building. I will use the free access I am entitled to for being fellow of the Spanish academy, right that I haven’t used in the whole stay. Then, at 11.00 I can go to the Mercure Hotel, where I have booked a room and go to the swimming pool overlooking the Coliseum while taking a bath.

I probably will walk then by the Fori Imperiali turning sometimes my gaze to see the building while heading to the academy, to get a deserved siesta. I will open the curtains of my studio, closed during 8 months.

And then I will be a NORMAL PERSON!

I often recall the image of Reagan the day after he left the White House I saw in 1989 in El Pais. He was at the porch of his home in California, in dressing gown, home slippers, picking up the newspaper, like one anonymous citizen. I could not find the picture in the Internet. This one is of the moment he left the White House on 20th January 1989.

In 1990 was the premiere of Scorsese’s Goodfellas. In this movie there is a very similar shot, inspired perhaps by Reagan’s. Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, after a life of crime, power, excitement, luxury and arrogance gets into the Witnesses Protection Program after getting all his crime mates into jail. Next day he is in an anonymous suburb of an unknown town picking up the newspaper, living on a salary. I will get the frame here. For the moment here is this one of when he and his wife are about to accept the deal.

(Just one anecdote: Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer of this film was also the one of Fassbinder’s Martha shot in Roma’s Spanish Steps, quoted in the post #23)

I have been thinking of this two images since 1990 when I heard about terrorists giving up and getting inserted again into society. It must be enormously sad such a downgrade of your emotional life.

Am I going to feel something of the kind? I will know soon.

After many scouting visits I finally decided what is the first image of the building I am going to see.

Instead of being sitting there, I will be in the place where the picture has been taken from.

The idea is to gather with some friends at 4.30 am in this little piazza.

In this place we will set the table, the glasses, etc. I will sit and slowly, I will open my eyes. Hopefully the lights of the building will be off. I will wait for the sun. Then we will toast for the end of the project.

Like when shooting a movie, you have to write the script carefully before hand, think about all the possibilities of framing, look for catering, etc. You can rent the camera and equipment only once. It is all about anticipation. I can see the building for the first time only once.

It have been already so many times that I have been exposed to the light of the Coliseum, I have turn my gaze away of it, so many blind walks, that many times I am completely accustom to it. You just close your eyes, ask the person coming with you to guide you, walk a backwards for a while, make enormous turns around to avoid streets, etc. Very normal stuff.

The other day, while walking to the meeting with Fie I thought to take a shortcut I never used before, because just 100 metres exposed to the Coliseum can save me 10 minutes walk. And while I was looking at the opposite direction, marching “in profile”, a thought clearly came to my mind: “what a stupid thing I am doing, all this Coliseum business!”.  I felt completely ridiculous.

After the first shock and uncertainty it was great. I felt again the artistic power of the project: “I am an artist. I do not believe in it. I am not a lunatic. I do this because it makes me feel things and experience emotions as, for example, the one of being ridiculous”.

I need a periodic refresh of this feeling, to get enthusiasm for the project.  I think is good to have it quite often.

I have kind of the same approach in what it refers to the people coming to my first view of the Coliseum. Sometimes I think that it is stupid to invite to the people to come at 4.30 in the morning to see something so banal as me open my eyes in front of the monument. In other occasions I feel how special and friendly the event can be. Let’s see in few days.

Every time I am preparing a visit to the Coliseum, for location scouting, dealing with the  owners of the business or for pure danger lust, it looks like an operation in a state of emergency. It is needed to plan the way to approach the place, the people who is coming, the tasks to accomplish, the material to bring…

A friend tells me about her problems when she goes to her country where, due to political problems, she has to be protected everytime she leaves her home. Bodyguards must to be arranged,  routes have to be checked before she start the trip and somebody has to precede her in every shop or cafeteria, to see if everything is okay. She says that this sensation of being depedent of somebody makes her think about me going to the Coliseum.

The other day I went again to the place to be photographed in front of the building blindfolded by Fie Tanderup, a Danish artist who is doing a collection of works in which she portraits people in places that have special relationship with them.

The pictures she took are on film, so I have to wait sometime to see it. I will publish it here, probably, after the end of the project.

The man and the building.

It seems that the event of seeing the Coliseum for the fist time is going to be low profile. Some friends are going to gather to see the building with me, on the 1st of July, at 4.30 am.  We will eat some tiramisu and drink iced coffee while the sun rises. If some of the readers of this blog like to attend, please drop me a line. It will be nice and cozy.

I discussed with some friends what to do until 4.30, if it is better to go to sleep for few hours or to stay awake the whole night. One of my friends recommeded to go to have some drinks before the event, but very wisely another replied that after not seeing the coliseum in 8 months it will be interesting if I do not see it double in the first time.

Kwong sent me some time ago this double images of the Coliseum, to see it in 3D.

People who follow this blog would not be surprised to know that I dream with the Coliseum. I have some daily life dreams with Him and, in the bad nights, I have also some anxiety dreams in which, try to guess…, I see it unintentionally.

I have a very clear memory of when I thought about this project for the first time: I was in a London bus, coming back home after look at many guides of Rome in Borders. However I have not recall whatsoever about the first time I dreamt in relation to it. It would be interesting to have a history of dreams, that collects the first occasions in which particular things were dreamt. When somebody dreamt for the first time, for example, that something happened in the dream could be undone by pressing Crtl+ Z?

Anyway, to be a resident in Rome and dream about the Coliseum you do not need to have an artist project on it. It is enough to bear daily life.

Ice Cream fridge

 Lollipop

Sugar 1

Sugar 2

Sugar 3

Badge

Chocolate

Advertising of Mozzarella

Advertising of a glasses

Advertising of exhibition poster

Advertising of city Christmas campaign

Advertising of I-don’t-know-what

Rental car logo

Logo of electrical company

Logo of a bank

Logo of a cafe (notice the grains in the arches)

Logo of a funerary business

Van of an iron monger

These days of inconveniences and threatening omens about my first visit to the Coliseum, in which sometimes the darkest thoughts come to my mind (as to leave the country without finishing the project) I am assaulted also by the sudden vertigo of the possibility of taking a taxi and go right away to the building and “finish with everything”.

It quite feels like a suicidal desire. Let’s say that the impulse is quite the same. (I remember many years ago that I assimilate that urgency with the desire of shaving your head, as a substitute of chopping it off. There was not shaving head trend at the time and it was something only for lunatics).

Taking the similarity of the emotion and bringing it forward, I will say that this blog would be my suicide note. I read in Wikipedia that it is estimated that 12-20% of suicides are accompanied by a note. Does this statistic also apply to art projects? Are the 20 % of the art projects accompanied by a text explaining the way is going to end?

Also in Wikipedia: According to Dr. Lenora Olson, the most common reasons that people contemplating suicide choose to write a suicide note include one or more of the following:

- To ease the pain of those known to the victim by attempting to dissipate guilt.
- To increase the pain of survivors by attempting to create guilt.
- To set out the reason(s) for suicide.
- To give instructions as to disposal of remains.
- Occasionally, those who have committed murder or some other offense will confess their acts in a note.

I am not sure to which of those would apply this Colossal Blog.

1962 Masaki Kobayashi’s Seppuku, tells a story about ritual suicide in the feudal Japan of the clans. At that time, when the wars between lords finished and a new stable order exists, there are not resources enough to maintain so many retainers as it used to be. Many samurais without lord wander through the country in total poverty. It is so humiliating for them (their honor do not allow them to beg) that some decide to commit honorable ritual suicide. To give official status to it, they ask the favour of a Lord, to provide them of the space and resources that the protocol requires. In the film, one lord  who accepted to help a samurai in this final act, gets compassion of him and hire him to take him out of poverty, removing therefore the reason to commit suicide. Great.

But then many other samurais ask for the same thing, and an increasing number of them are betting with their life just to provoke the situation of being hired, with not real intentions of finishing their lives honourably. Unfortunately the only way to show your full commitment is just to finish your life.

I think that I might be thinking about going to the Coliseum just to provoke this post, with not real desire of finishing the project. The true honorable  ritual suicide will happen on the 1st of July and this situation now is just result of weakness. To leave the country without seeing it would be also to cover myself with the most horrible ignominy.

One possibility of making special the act of viewing for the first time the Coliseum might be to contemplate it right after make love under its arches. The word “fornication” comes from the habits of Roman prostitutes commonly solicited  under the arches of the Coliseum and other significantly dark Roman buildings. Like many others during the history of the building, under the moonlight, the Colossal Blog Project group, hiring the services of prostitutes both sexes to celebrate the ocassion. Well, I don’t know… perhaps is too “Santiago Sierra’s” for my liking.

Also, this would look pretty much like Bacchanalia, and these used to be held in a grove near the Aventine Hill (Wikipedia)

fornication c.1300, from O.Fr. fornication, from L.L. fornicationem (nom. fornicatio), from fornicari “fornicate,” from L. fornix (gen. fornicis) “brothel,” originally “arch, vaulted chamber”, from fornus “oven of arched or domed shape.” Strictly, “voluntary sex between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman;”.

I haven’t found any appropriated picture to illustrate this post.

The road to preparing a first view of the Coliseum is full of obstacles. It is so frustrating that it invites you to think that there is a spell to make look insignificant my insignificant project. As my friend says ” you are dealing with the clerical-conservative bureaucratic system of Rome”. I start to feel like leaving without seeing it.

I dealt with the hotel, couple of cafes, private terraces, catering services, and for the moment everything resists to be closed (the deal closed, the business open). I think this is a project that doesn’t inspire confidence to the local business owners.

I do not know how it is going to be but at least certain facts are clear:

Latitude: +41.89 (41°53′24″N)
Longitude: +12.5 (12°30′00″E)

Dawn: 05.06
Sunrise: 05.40

The phase of the moon will be something like this:

So, even if the lights of the building are off, it will be softly illuminated by the moon.

In the eighteenth century it was a must for British visitors doing the Grand Tour to contemplate the building in full moon.

Eadible “Moons or Rome” and “For the city and for the world” biscuits.

I wonder from which direction saw Titus the building for the first time once it was officially finished.

I hope to have more facts in few days, at least the weather forecast.

Since I arrived to Rome I was looking forward (notice the expression) to take this picture.  

I am playing the role of Oedipus, a man who willingly removed his capacity of sight. The look is inspired in Pasolini’s 1967 Edip0 Re

I have been always fascinated by this story, sometimes because the idea of  ”fate”, sometimes because the “fear and disgust to knowledge”, now due to the blindness. Tiresias, the blind, is the wisest man in town.

At least temporarily you remove your capacity of seeing when attending to the Unsight Restaurant. A friend writes me about her experience when having dinner in the Berlin branch. After you order you go into a pitch dark room where you have a full dinner assisted by blind staff, who take care of you. Then you receive the dishes and a very simple transaction with your survival needs becomes a strong experience. Manners and senses change their meaning.

Many of the things she said about how do you feel in the restaurant reminded me my visits to the Coliseum blindfolded.

On the first of July hopefully my blindness will be revoked.

 It is what happened with artists: as Perich said “the worst blind person is the one who doesn’t want to hear”.

I like to repeat this picture from the book Roma Violata

To compare it with these two that are almost contemporary to that one

This is Hiroshima before and after the bomb. The Roman one is like a frame you can put in between in the sequence.
The square on the top right, almost in the same place that occupies the Coliseum in the picture of Rome, is the location of the Castle of Hiroshima:

Hiroshima Castle, sometimes called Carp Castle is a castle in Hiroshima, Japan which was the home of the daimyō (feudal lord) of the Hiroshima han (fief). Originally constructed in the 1590s, the castle was destroyed in the atomic bombing in 1945. It was rebuilt in 1958, a replica of the original which now serves as a museum of Hiroshima’s history prior to World War II. (from Wikipedia).

Hiroshima today by google maps.

Tokyo Tower is specially creative in light effects.

The structure has to compete with many other buildings and light emitters through the city.

Recently it has been an especial attraction for the visitors to upper deck of the tower that consists on 5.000 electric bulbs organised in the shape of the Milky Way.

Also the Coliseum is very creative in the light arrangements. There is a special set for the days that a death penalty has been commuted anywhere in the world. 

BBC in January 2007: Rome has lit up the arches of the Colosseum to highlight Italy’s support for a global ban on the death penalty. Italy launched its campaign in the wake of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s execution, which sparked widespread protest among Italians. Rome’s mayor said the Colosseum, once a place of gladiatorial combat, was now a “symbol of peace and reconciliation”.

To maximize the effect of seeing the Coliseum delicately fading in my view, I am asking the city of Rome to turn off the lights of the building for few hours. The director of the Spanish Academy in Rome has been so kind as to write the three institutions of which depends the lights of the building. If everything goes well the lights of the building will be off from 4.30 am to 6 am on the 1st of July. Without of this light pollution it will be a bit easier to see the Milky Way.

Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson and the Archbishop of Santa Fe, Michael Sheehan, attending a special ceremony at the Coliseum on 15th April 2009, when New Mexico abolished the death penalty.

The fascination of Rome has been decanted drop by drop into the Coliseum. I have been inmune to it because every possibility of being fascinated has been delegated to the contemplation of the building. This will colaborate to the intensity of that moment.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, artist Manuel Saiz was to remember that distant dawn when his friends took him to discover the Coliseum.

What I am expecting for the final event of the project is just to be place in a good spot overlooking the building when the light of the dawn is hitting it.

The key element of looking at the building for the first time will be to share the experience with friends and colleagues. It is important to watch, but as much of it, working in synergy, is important to see other people watching, to being watched watching, to see yourself watching.
This conjunction of visual relationships was, apparently, of extreme importance during the Roman gladiatorial games. They could get the feedback of their own inebriety when watching the blood, on the emotion of others watching them inebriated in blood. “The gladiatorial combats damage the capacity of rational thought” says the literature and so does the art, if we trust Stendhal’s Italian experiences: I felt myself grown incapable of rational thought, but rather surrendered to the sweet turbulence of fancy, as in the presence of some beloved object… The tide of emotion which overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it scarce was to be distinguished from religious awe.

St Augustine writes memorably in his Confesions of one Alypius, who was eventually to become a Christian bishop, going unwillingly to some shows with his friends. Though determined to keep his eyes shut, as soon as he peeped he was hooked. The spectacle has done his work: “when he saw the blood, it was as though he had drunk deeply on savage passion” (The Coliseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard).

Anna suggested me to give my talk there in the cafe, at 4.30 in the morning, while watching for the first time the building, but I think my capacity of rational thought, if normally scarce, there will be at minimum, especially before coffee is served.

Still some meetings to hold but it seems that my first viewing is going to be something like this:

My friend Manuela tells me about her aunt in Quito (Ecuador), who did not see the sea until she was 17 years old. She knew so much about the sea, she had an idea so precise (even if probably not accurate) about how it was before she saw it , that after the moment she encountered it she had experienced two different seas, the imagined one, still vivid and pretty sharp in her imagination, and the real one she saw on that occasion. There were actaully three seas (almost like Kosuth chairs): the imagined one, the real one, and the result of the combination of both when there were confronted.

Ruins are inspiring because the one who look at it fills in the spaces between the stones, he is forced to supply the missing pieces. To experience something without seeing it also invites to create features for the details not known. What I am now speculating about is on how is a building that once I see his remains I woudl be able to speculate aobut how it was.

Due to the fact that the place I thought was the best for the end of my project is not available, I have to look for a new solution that can give me, at least, the same results.

As I am clearly picturing in this Colossal Blog project, as many annoyances a project provides, more useful the experience results. I am confident that the extra time and energy I am going to invest in looking for a new location for the project is going to bear fruits that the Gladiatori was not set to offer.

So I am scouting for a new place from which to look for the first time to the Coliseum. I went to the site to tour around the building, once again, blindfolded and with a guide. I walked 20 or 30 steps and stopped with the building in my back to look at the landscape to search for new spots and possibilities. I am like a filmmaker looking for the perfect shot and who can look at everything except to the shot. These are the appreciations:

First I check hotel availability in the zone. There is a Mercure hotel a bit further in via Labicana, the Delta Colosseo.

I could be the person on the top, looking at the Coliseum from the pool, or the one in the window at the right, watching from his room.

The view from the pool is good, but a bit far. Actually the building of the Gladiatori covers a part of the Coliseum. My friendly guide went to the terrace and took this picture from there.

Next to the Gladiatori Hotel is this salmon pink building, that belongs to a savings bank. The offices of the bank are in the ground floor. The rest looks pretty empty, but the logo of the bank is in the window’s glasses.

I thought the possibility of breaking into the bank one night, stay there until is light, looking at the building, and then leave in the morning. An adventure Sette volte sette or The Hot Rock. These are two movies in which they commit one crime in order to commit a completely different one, not connected at all. For me to see the Coliseum is not exactly a crime.

Here there is a lower terrace, on a bar. It needs more research.

This building n front, up on the hill, must have a wonderful view. It has two cafes downstairs.

For ask for the terrace it is necessary start ringing all these bells.

Let’s see how it goes.

Art projects are fragile. I cannot recall an art project I like that can be qualified as (accused of) “solid”. “Solid Art” sounds to me oxymoronic. If I have to say something about an art work with good reasons to exist I rather would say  that  is “a coherent  project”, a vaporous coherent one.

The fragility of art projects (even the very coherent ones) gets evident when the project enters in contact with non-art environments and structures. I prefer not to approach to people with intestests alien to those of the art, because this relationship is regularly disappointing and changes my character (and we want a 100% full artist personality, don’t we?) Only people, artists or not, who understand what is the peculiar specific value of your work and appreciate it are worth to work with. The rest is an open door to future humiliations.

By a little misunderstanding I went to the hotel Gladiatori to propose a possibility for the ending of my Coliseum project with the wrong idea that the owner was an art collector. There is another hotel nearby owned by a collector but not this one. I just new about the mistake once in the taxi to the meeting.

I was helped by the facilitator of the encounter to arrive to the hotel and to get upstairs where the manager would meet us. We entered the cafeteria on the top, next to the terrace, and I had to walk with my eyes closed to get a seat, due to the Coliseum invades this room by every orifice. I sat and waited. When the manager came an awkward situation happened because I needed to walk backwards to shake his hand, as to turn to received him would have implied a perfect view of the building. At that point I already felt embarrassed and perceived, beyond the manager’s polite professionality, a hint of what-a-loony-I-am-talking-with attitude. I was there, explaining my project and the value of my work, like an Ambassador of Another Mind Frame who tries to get into commercial relationships with a country that do not have any interests in the exchange. I recalled the image of European ambassadors in the courts of the Japanese Shoguns, trying to make the point of the importance of industralization nad the advances already done in their countries.

My intend was to get their have a breakfast at the terrace with 30 people on the 1st of July, at 4.30 am, and wait with them until the daylight unveils the building. I explained as better as I could and we left with promises of following emails. The key phrase of the meeting, profousely repeated was “we can do that”.

It has been one month of unreplied messages and kind of vaguely promising calls (one way only). Few days ago I got the deterrent estimate for this 90 minutes event: 3.000 euros.

I am now looking for a new location or possibility. More news to come.

Privileged terrace of the Gladiatori Hotel. The picture was taken with the Coliseum in my back. Between the hotel and the Coliseum lie the rests of the Ludus Magnus, where the gladiators trained.

My refusal to deal with people who are not in the know is in tune (although about other theme) with this statement P. Ruiz P. did in 1935: “Toutes choses que je fais en relation avec l´art me donnent une grande joie. Néanmoins je ne vois pas pourquoi tout le monde s´occupe d´art, lui demande des comptes, et à son sujet laisse libre cours à sa propre sottise. Les Musées sont autant de mensonges, les gens qui s´occupent d´art sont pour la plupart des imposteurs”.

I have a couple of images a friend took for me during the winter of a kind of South American football league that has been taking place outside the Coliseum. Inside and outside games.

Yesterday there was an “important” football match happening in Rome. The Olympic Stadium, in the Nothern  part of the city, is prepared for 72.698 spectators and I guess yesterday it was full. This is roughly the amount of people who were able to attend  to a show at the Coliseum in the golden times of the Roman Empire.

A big part of the audience came from abroad, mainly Catalonia and Manchester, not as many Romans in the public as the in the times of the gladiatorial games. What it was going to happen in the Olympic Stadium was felt in the whole city. Attendants were not so blood thirsty, but just in case beer was forbidden to be sold during many hours.

“Bebanda magica” was not allowed, but profusely advertised through the city for long time, curiously enough, in a Coliseum thematic billboards and installations.

Advertisment has made intensive use of the ”historical dimension” of the event, same in the world of beer than in this of shoes.

There is too much barbarity on sports for me to cope with it. I prefer do not see anything related to it.

There are some repeting proceedings in this project that are bit annoying after seven months of practice. I am kind of tired, for example, of interupting conversations when passing through the Piazza Venezia in the H bus due to I have to be alert to do not look to the right.

An important nuisance I have is to try to sleep or dive into my book when taking off from Ciampino airport. I always look for an aisle seat that makes it easier. But the other day taking off it was a moment of turbulence and instinctively I looked through the window at the fields down. I was far from seeing it, but i felt a sudden unexpected emotion.

It is clear that I am not in the target of this Lufthansa campaign.

I am preparing the end of my Colisem project. I am going to see the building on the 1st of July, conditions of it still being arranged.

But the evening before, already “in costume”, I will give a talk at the academy about my experience. The name of the talk is:

I HAVE SPENT EIGHT MONTHS IN ROME AND I HAVE NOT SEEN THE COLISEUM. TOMORROW I WILL.

I was designing the card this came to my mind.

I HAVE SPENT EIGHT MONTHS IN THE COLISEUM AND I HAVE NOT SEEN ROME. TOMORROW I WILL.

Unfortunately is too late for this most radical project. Perhaps one of my next projects will be to spend 8 months inside the Taj Mahal before seeing India.

Even if radical I know other projects similar to this new one other people have done, like ” I have been ten years in Alcatraz and I have not seen San Francisco” or ” I have been all my life in the Forbiden City and I have not seen China”.

In a way I have been all these months inside the Coliseum: the coliseum inside my head.

Here is a self-portrait of Alighiero Boetti from 1968 that is like an illustration of the idea I was suggesting on post number 71.

Following the logic of my post, if Manzoni’s work makes the whole world his work, and the inverted Coliseum in Bath, makes the whole world an arena, here could be also both:

- or the whole world outside of the stone is Alighero Boetti,

- or the whole world is compressed inside the stone, like in a kind of a universe before expansion.

The travertine used in the construction of the Coliseum was brought from the Tiber quarries, about seventeen miles from Rome. A road specially built for this purpose, along which, according to tradition, 30.000 Jewish prisoners assigned to the task formed an uninterrupted double line. This prisoners were taken to Rome by Titus, who won the Jewish/Roman war (66-73). Also seems to be that the main budget for the construction of the building was taken from the looting of Jerusalem Titus did.

Once built, the Coliseum also used Jews for feeding the shows (and the animals featured on it).

It is easy to imagine money looted by Nazis from Jewish families before WWII was used to build the Congress Hall and Documentation Centre in Nuremberg.

And also Berlin Olympic Stadium by Werner March 1936.

The Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany (German: Luxemburger Abkommen, Hebrew: הסכם השילומים) was signed on September 10, 1952.^[1] and entered in force on March 27, 1953.^[2] According to the Agreement, West Germany was to pay Israel for the slave labor and persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, and to compensate for Jewish property that was stolen by the Nazis. (Wikipedia)

As far as I know, no reparations agreement was ever signed between Roman Empire and any of the countries looted and destroy (rebuilt in a Roman way).

Because, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

I have received a clipping of La Reppublica from Enrique, the director of our Academy.

Two American tourists have sent back anonymously to Rome  some fragments of the Coliseum they took on a holliday trip 25 years ago. They have been suffering remorse all these years until definetively took the decision of repairing the mess.

Also Tom Ripley, played here by Matt Damon, is about to take the mattock out of his bag.

Those citizens are following a very trendy, responsible, politically correct, movement. The next step should be to return all other souvenirs they collected in their trips, including pottery from France, and a Scotland Yard plastic hat they got in Heathrow before they left the Kingdom.

But other tourists who have collected stones should also give it back. Going a bit further, it would be interesting to dismantle San Pietro to get all the stones belonging to the Coliseum back to the building, and all other palaces, bridges, staircases… until the building return to its original splendorous shape (Empty the British Museum too!).

The fair response of the Comune di Roma should be to send the stones back to the quarries, dismantle the whole Coliseum and then have, finally, the peace with Nature restored. No more remorse.

Something similar is written in Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse 5when he narrates backwards  the bombing and destruction of Europe during the WWII, as if the bombs were sucked by the planes and taken back to America to be dismantled and their components dispersed on the Nature.

But you know, Manuel, that this is hollow idealism, something impossible to achieve, if only by the law of thermodynamics. As an artist would say, if we cannot get back to the paradise, the only way out is to go as far as possible in the disorder. I think I must steal some stones from the Parthenon in Athens and send it to Rome,  with a contrite note saying that I took them from the Coliseum some years ago.

This city is full of fragments. Please send integral experiences only.

I got this picture from Casilda, a guest at the Academy, who went to the Coliseum during her four days stay and told me about her visit.

Apparently these tourists like to bring their two dogs to all the places they visit, They can see the sights from their travelling pod.

I recall Shimabuku’s video Then, I decided to give a tour of Tokio to the Octopus from Akashi (2000) , documentary recount of his experience when capturing an octopus in Akashi,  South of Japan, and give him a ride to Tokyo in shinkansen to bring it back in the evening to Akashi again and release him alive. In the way he shows him the mount Fuji, and Tsukiji, the Tokyo fish market. Never before an octopus leaved the premises of Tsukiji alive.

For the artist, as he said, this was his own Apollo project.

Shimbuku and octopus.

I arrived to Osnabrueck for European Media Art Festival and the first thing I saw in the street was this babelian billboard.

Images of the Coliseum are spread all over the world,. They belong to a “meta-nation” of icons. I wonder how many times I have seen in my life images of the Coliseum until now. In every little corner I have visited there was a holographic index of every international icon.

I had a lead I am going to follow about a Pope who thought as an interesting idea to get pilgrims to take home some debris from the Coliseum, so in some years the building would have disappear into the world in homage to the martyrs that suffered there. The building would have been put to ground zero standards and the land would have been ready for the construction of a new church. I do not know why ut did not happen.

I have imagined all the time the pilgrims with their little plastic bags full of debris but there was no plastic at that time.

Trajan pro type face

Trajan® Pro

The inscription on the base of the Trajan column in Rome is an example of classic Roman letterforms, which reached their peak of refinement in the first century A.D. It is believed that the letters were first written with a brush, then carved into the stone. These forms provided the basis for this Adobe Originals typeface designed by Carol Twombly in 1989. Trajan is an elegant typeface well-suited for display work in books, magazines, posters, and billboards.

Today, as Holy Friday, the Coliseum becomes the stage for The Stations of the Cross, a seasonal Catholic performance put on by the Church. It has been on show since 1749, when Pope Benedict XIV put the cross in the middle. A well established re-enactment play.

Yesterday, when I was coming back home, I saw the shining of the building, specially illuminated for the occasion.

The light is coming from the back of the Palatine Hill, that I discovered yesterday is what allows me to come home without being blindfolded everyday.

The rays made think of the picture of the bombing of Rome and the Nuremberg parades.

Last night there was an earthquake with epicentre 75 kilometres away from Rome. At 3.30 am I heard my studio shaking and I went out of bed to see what was going on. There were two different moments of trembling separated by 5 minutes. Then it finished and I came back to bed.

I couldn’t sleep though. After so many thoughts I got these last months about the destruction of the Coliseum, the films depicting it, the tells of the ruin and decay, the destruction of certain parts through pillage or earthquakes in the 14th century, this earthquake thrills me. It might certainly disappear before I see it.

I think it is still there (I did not go to check if it was okay). But anyway, today we got the same swing.

I have experienced  in Japan several quakes stronger than this one, some in huge concrete buildings, some in wooden houses. I have even attended to an earthquake survival course on a training/entertainment facility at the firemen headquarters in Ikebukuro, North of Tokyo. Japanese are well prepared operatively and psychologically for such an eventuality. I have this dreamy idea of London or Paris being hit by a powerful earthquake and, due to the French or British citizens and emergency workers being completely confused, the rescue tasks have to be undertaken by Japanese tourists, extremely calm and organised.

I would like to insert again this image, that is in the 53 post, to confront it with other similar.

It is the display of the proportion of the Coliseum in relation to the Circus in Bath, made by drawing one into the other at the same scale.

This illustration, created perhaps by John Wood the architect of the Circus, shows the humbleness of this new architectural milestone in relationship with the greatness of the Flavian Amphitheatre. At the same time it suggests that the Circus is such beautiful building as for the 50,000 spectators of the Coliseum to be watching it at indefinitely.

Here is the other image. The visionary architect in this case is Carlo Fontana. He planned in 1703 a church to be built filling completely the arena. Church, and ultimatelly religion, has become here spectacle to look at.

During the Roman Games the Coliseum worked as a frame, creating limits and distance for the violence, that remains in the arena isolated from the rest of the urban civilised life of Rome. It is very different from the other violence and death, those of the war and the accidents happening in process of the construction of the Empire.

Death in the arena is somehow virtual, second generation drama, even if real people suffered and died there. Like action movies, the most explicit violence is separed from the public by the formal frame. Inside the projected church within the coliseum the passion of the Christ is also virtual, blood and flesh made with wine and bread.

I would like to see the Coliseum in this post as if it was a frame for an art work, decorated with leaves, fruits, and signs carved all around.

The violence of the art work is restrained by the frame. The gallery works as a frame for the show. It creates the floodgate that allows the simultaneous existence of art and life, destruction and production.

“A skeleton; half-length; set in an oval frame with hourglasses and skulls and bones”

“The Damned; three bust-length male figures surrounded by
flames; set in an oval frame with bats, devils and seven-headed beasts”

From a series of six engravings of memento mori* by the German artist Alexander Mair, 1605 (at the British Museum)

To encircle the Coliseum blindfolded made me think again about the inverted Coliseum in Bath, which I already toured couple of months ago.

If I had been blindfolded in that occasion too, the differences would have been:

- To circle clockwise as the other day, I would have got the wall on my left.
- The walk would have taken less time, because the Bath one is smaller and because the perimeter is encircle from the inside, cutting then some distance.
- Although the angle of my walk would have been the same  it would have happened an issue concerning the concepts or “concave” and “convex” that I cannot manage to define in my mind.

This inversion of the Coliseum can imply metaphoriacally that the whole world is just this small circle with only one tree (the Amazonian of the square) in the middle. Or implies that the whole world beyond the walls of the square is a Coliseum, a violent spectacle. Like The Great Teatre of the World.

In 1961 Piero Manzoni created this work that has the same conceptual mechanism.  By creating this pedestal he claims that the whole Earth is his sculpture.

Base of the World, Magic Base No. 3 by Piero Manzoni 1961 Homage to Galileo

Socle du monde (Base of the World), 1961
iron, bronze, 82×100x100cm
Herning Kunstmuseum, Denmark.

By crossing the available information in Internet about this work and Manzoni’s life I have determined that probably the work was concieved and realised in January 1961. This happens to be the month of my birthday. I wonder if the Earth became a sculpture the same day that became “something exterior in relation to me”. Before “everybody is an artist” is “everybody is a pedestal” (”Jeder Mensch Ein Podest”).

The closest to the Coliseum I had been until yesterday was when using the tube.

The proximity of the tunnel to the building is surprising. However, the sensorial experience of the Coliseum in the underground is null.

Yesterday I got a quasi-complete sensorial experience of the Coliseum (and I guess few extra-sensorial too).

I touched

Smelled

Listened to

and tasted the Coliseum.

Everything except the thing.

Here is a short review: 1- It is cold, especially in the shadowy part, rugous, and impossible to hold in your arms. 2- It smells moisture, like after the rain. 3- The sound of the tourists shouting and the cars do not allowed me to get much of sound of the building itself but of the atmosphere surrounding it. I was naively expecting to be able to hear some harmonics of the rests of the vibrations the steps of elephants made in 80 AD. 4- It is definitively savory, kind of salty.

I wonder how many people has licked the Coliseum since the building is there. Apart of the arena itself, where I guess many gave it a try. Perhaps since the Jet culture there are some Japanese visitors, who like so much Italy and the taste of Italian things (Oishii desu ne). Maybe a model made out of pizza.

Anyway. The expedition started at the Colosseo underground station. From the very inside of the station, before leaving by the gates, you can already see it. I had to put my eye patches right there.

This time I had two people to help me, do to the complicated logistics of the operation

Ana (from the door of the station)

and Daniel.

The assignment was to make me turn as close as possible around to the Coliseum, touching the exterior all around the perimeter. The secondary tasks were three: keep my physical integrity intact, document photographically the adventure and keep track of the timing of the operation.  We went clockwise.

 Here are some pictures of the way.

Useless try outs of measuring the height of the building.

There were some difficult spots in which I was helped.

People looked at me, apparently as if they thought I was injured.

I passed next to police agents of different eras.

Since I touched in and I touched out 44 minutes 12 seconds have passed. Most of the time I was with my eyes open behind the patch. I did not realised until very late that perhaps closing the eyes would have help me to concentrate. I am not sure what made me more confident.

Even the performatic aspect of the visit, I feel it was really an approach of a sculptor. It is very volume, size and material related action. I think ideas about what happened in this visit will come to me in the next days.

The amount of people playing the role of audience in gladiatorial movies makes also a difference in terms of the scene’s  intensity. This audience can be seen as “servo-mechanisms” or “signar repeater” that amplify the efect of the arena for the bigger audience of movie theaters. Or could be like the payed audience in theatres, always prepared to clap at a signal of the scene director (In Spanish is called “cla” . I think it comes from “a-cla-mation”). This people, the hired clappers, are part of the play as much as these actors playing audience.

The quality and capacity of the amplifiers in movies is directly connected with budget.

Gladiator 2000

Quo Vadis 1951

Androcles and the Lion 1952

The Last Days of Pompeii 1935

Maciste, Gladiatore di Sparta 1964

Life of Brian 1979

Today is the Maratona di Roma, which starts and finishes at the Coliseum.

One of the important elements of public spectacles is the amount of people attending: if the crowd is big, the event is more exciting. I think this is clear in this “most participated sporting event” as it was in the times of the Gladiatorial games. More people make it more special, the crowd becoming one person reacting at once to the same stimulus. The record of the runner or the death of the gladiator are pushed to the top by the mass. 

There is a touristic engineering anecdote that plays nicely with this “crowding effect”: the power station located near Niagara Falls that produce energy by the fall of water has the control of the volume of water diverted from the Falls to the turbine. I heard that the criteria they use to decide how much water can they withdraw from the Falls is the occupancy level of the hotels in the area: as many tourists, more splendorously the water falls. It is as if the Coliseum grows and shrinks with the tourists.

The “crowding effect” happened also, I guess, in the concert Paul McCarney gave in the Coliseum on 11th May 2003 when he performed in front of 500.000 people.

But the day before there was also a frisson, for 400 people only, by the opposite feeling, the one of exclusivity. 400 fans payed almost £1000 each to attend to the concert McCarthy gave inside the building.

There were also “exclusive” killing in relation with the games, not as glamorous as the ones in the arena, but more intimate. I learn that, in order to make lions and other wild animals keen to hunt and  devour running humans, they were fed living slaves during the days the beasts were training as executioners. They were not very enthusiastic about human flesh as start but, as when giving free small amount of heroin to kids, they were getting addicts quickly, making worthwhile the slave investment.

The Coliseum has an important role in the film Jump. One of the most important scenes is happening there and there are very beautiful shots of it during the film. I cannot resist of posting some of them.

The plot of the film is based in the condition of the main character that allows him to “jump” from one place in the world to a different one just by thinking on it. How he adquired this wonderful ability is not explained in detail but the fact is that the character is now in Rome and an instant later in Tokyo, to go to the States three seconds later. The expectator who follows the story is also jumping mentally from one place to the other. The main Coliseum scene is quite long with some sightseeing, love and a big chunk of fighting. The “jumping” is what we can call “only local”: the guy (and now his mate too) jumps only within few metres distances. They never leave the Coliseum.

However, by watching the extras of the DVD,  I learned that a big part of the Coliseum interior was remade on a studio in Toronto, Canada. During this scene the shooting is jumping seamless from Rome to Toronto and back many times.

 The parts are  cut in styrofoam

Arranged as the original

and put onto a blue screen set

This explains the damage the characters are allowed to cause to the stones.

 The writer says in the “making of” that he wrote the scene for the Pantheon, but it was not possible and they were very lucky of having the Coliseum instead. He says it enthusiastically, but I think he has a hidden hint of complain. Ah! unfaithful!

I found this book by Gastone Mazzanti called Roma Violata  that tells the story of the bombings of Rome during WWII, mainly from the point of view of the bombardiers, as the book is full of aerial views of the city before, during and after the bombs fall.

Here there is a nice view of Rome while some bombs are being dropped. The Coliseum is placed in the upper right side of the picture.

During the war the allies demarked a large area of Rome to be preserved from aerial raids. The plan included all the main historical monuments as, of course, the Coliseum.

Some of the American soldiers arriving on the liberation day to the site are convinced in this moment that the preservation plan has failed.

The site was saved for future filming.

This location of Jeans instead is not available anymore.

The Coliseum has, actually, a lot to do with Grand Canyon, although the most important element of similarity is that both are in the folder named “Popular Destinations”. All popular destinations are interchangeable.

Here is the landscape in Jeans, a 1998 Boollywood film by S. Shankar. As a result of a very confusing (at same time than simple) script, the main characters, a couple in love, travel first from LA to Grand Canyon.

How they get there is one of the magical secrets of Bollywood genre: a song starts and they are suddently dancing in a different place.

A little later in the film, two or three songs that do not involve teletransportation, they are in the Coliseum.

Then they appear successively in other popular destinations.

Same locations are selected for 2008 Jumper, directed by Doug Liman. The script is certainly less Bollywood style, but it shares the same level of confusion and simplicity than Jeans.

Here are the main characters (they are in love).

She is so happy of being staring at it! Lucky girl.

And here is the bad guy.

They have also other locations in common as for example:

During my American trip in 1995 I already mentioned,  I visited Grand Canyon. I was driving from Phoenix and arrived too late in the evening to see the landscape, as already was dark. I had booked an hotel in a commercial complex few kilometres before the edge, including restaurants, shops and a brand new IMAX cinema. Of course the film in show was a 3D glasses 70 mm documentary film about the Canyon, featuring spectacular shots from a plane flying deep inside the gorge. I had this special, unique experience the day before I saw the real canyon.

I thought (already I was into “it”) how extravagant would have been to watch the film and leave the area without visiting the “real thing”. At that time I was in a programme of the American government called “International Visitor” invited to travel all around the country to visit things of my interest as an artist. The theme of the trip for me was “Virtual Reality and computer generated immersive environments”, so it came naturally.

The objet of the trip to the Coliseum couple of days ago was to visit Rewind, a “museum” showing a 3d film rconstruction of the times in which the Coliseum was at ist best. The venue is 80 metres away of the real building. You pay, you get your audio guide and follow a member of the staff who leads you through a passage of provincial town fair attraction tricks, simulating an archaeological site. The technology at this point consist just in flickering light and terror film like sounds. But it seems that the weapons and utensils found in this mock excavation are took from a real one. At the end of the passage is the film theatre. To watch the programme it is needed to wear special glasses. The film is very well made, everything CGI, and gives a clear view of how the urban landscape and the swing of the games might have been. However, the way of telling the story, the characters that lead it, the editing, etc, is so inspired in Walt Disney aesthetics that it spoils all the fun for intellectual Coliseum avoiders. It must be this way though, because it is the only possibility to have enough visitors as to pay the enormous cost of the installation and production of the film.

After the shocking “reality experience” I had in the way to Rewind, that set the limit in one direction, it was good to set the one in the other side, of the fake and artificial 80 metres away of the Coliseum.

Few days ago my friend Pedro suggested that at the end of the project I may past the polygraph or lie detector test, to probe to sceptics that I have not seen the Coliseum. I am very interested in pass it now. Just to KNOW if I have seen it or not.

In the Roman empire times, at the games, there were very efective tools to probe if  people lied. As for example, after a match in the arena, a gentleman uses to go touching all the bodies lying in the floor with a red hot iron to deterrmine with 100%of accurancy if they were dead, and not just pretending.

Yesterday there was a new visit to the site, a very turning-pointed one.

The walk started at San Giovanni underground station, with the intention of visiting a 3D virtual Coliseum existing on a venue next to the real one. I was going to walk through a couple of conflicting passages my guide was going to lead.

We were talking lively about one of my previous projects when we crossed Piazza di San Giovanni Laterano. At the time we passed near the obelisk, as I realised few seconds after, we encircled it by the wrong side.

I raised my eyes and I saw the top corner of a building, and by the time I felt a clear matrix match, I was already away. I saw for a fraction of a second the top corner of the Coliseum. I had calculated that the duration was proportional to a two PAL video frames, which is like a 1/12 of a second. Ein Augenblick. Ja, ein Augenblick.*

Suddenly I realised the side of the obelisk, the precise place I was. Indecision, hesitation. Was it the Coliseum? Yes, it was it. Is it a valid hit? Yes, it should be. What a dishearten feeling!

Two frames in a life can make you leave the paradise and throw you to wander in the exile. It is like a click that provokes the nuclear reaction, the instant that bound you to the car accident, the single wrong mouse click that deletes the hard drive.

I needed to seat, because the impression was too strong. It has happened because everything was becoming too normal, not exciting enough. And suddenly it is again at its highest emotional point.

But it was important not to throw the towel away immediately because, actually, I did not know yet was had happened. I remember the examination for my motorcycle license many years ago, having a sudden stop of the engine in the middle of the test. I alighted from the motorbike giving up discouraged when the examiner said: “oh, it is just a stop. Please turn the engine on again and continue.” And I got the license. So let’s don’t do anything but think about the implications.

For a filmmaker this problem is completely irrelevant. The fiction doesn’t require any connection with the reality of the things. And the show must go on.

For a philosopher, it is doubtful what is “the reality of the things”.

For a conceptual artist of the 70’s will be the worse of the tragedies. He might abandon the project or lie.

I think I am a cynic and an engineer . I like to tell the whole truth about the event and try to get as much out of it as possible: I took this glimpse as a warning the Coliseum has thrown to me. I have been certainly touched and, as if the arrow was impregnated in curare, I have been poisoned. But fortunately I am still alive and I might be like arsenic eaters in Styria, Austria, who use to eat arsenic in small portions as a stimulant: I got my stimulation and might develop an immunity to it in the future. Art projects are characterised by its resiliency, its capability of assume errors. They are done in order to get the experience and errors increased the knowledge. As John Cage said, if you do not believe in the cause/effect relationship, the error doesn’t exist.

One only fear. It can be also like a mad scientist: something goes wrong in the experiment and he is exposed briefly to radiation. Everything seems normal, but the hair can be falling down in the next few days.

We continue the visit as planned, as if nothing has happened. Everything is the same and different at the same time, more dramatic, in a new level of the experience.

Today I still feel a certain degree of disquietude. It reminds me the days after being burglared in London (it happened twice): an uncomfortable sensation of unsafely and loss. It passed in few days.

*Eternal means eternal, it means eternal, you must see that; and yet again it’s not eternal, it’s an instant, a single instant . Wozzeck.

Here is a building which features a combination of shapes and structures that seems to have been created to celebrate my yesterday’s speculations.

It is the Library of Vancouver, sent by a friend after reading the blog this morning.
Architect Moshe Safdie 
Built on 1993

Other views that link mentally with familiar buildings.

And once I am in the continent, I am posting this image of a building in Phoenix, Arizona, I visited in 1995. It seems to be made with the same brand of childrens construction blocks.

Tempe campus music building. Wesley Peters, Frank Lloyd Wright’s son-in-law, designed the building, which is a neighbour to Lloyd Wright’s Gammage Auditorium.

To read Benet’s book has been very rewarding in relation of my theme: art projects + buildings.

The Coliseum doesn’t look so much like the tower of Babel (have already the two days passed? Time flies) but there are interesting details that connect the Colossal Blog with Brueghel’s The Tower of Babel, main reference of the book of Juan Benet.

Brueghel’s is the first European painting dedicated to a building. Not only is central in the scene, as many others in the Renaissance, but also is the main if not the only motif. The attention of the artist to the building is focused in the same way in the painting and in my project, the relationship is kept although the art and the artists have changed.

Brueghel analyses the details of the construction in order to understand, in a real practical way, all the technicalities. It is not only a representation of the myth, but a speculation of the way it would have being built. I clearly sympathise with this engineering obsession.

A fascinating point that Benet makes is that this building doesn’t shelter the myth, but embodies it. I think The Colossal Blog also depicts this relationship with the building, but I am wondering what it is the correspondence with the painting: the painting in Brueghel’s work, is in mine as: the blog?, the electronic content?, the text?, my experience?, the building itself? I am not sure of what is the carrier in this my work.

One VERY different element in the two works is that Brueghel’s is somehow an homage to failure, while my project, fingers crossed, is a monument and an incarnation of success (of the negation).

Another version, this time helicoidal.

This version is not by Brueghel.

The idea people had during the Middle Ages of what was the reason the Coliseum have been built was very different from the one we have today. Hopkins and Beard: “The standard medieval view was that the Colosseum was a Temple of the Sun, originally roofed with a gilded dome, and the home of all kind of demons; and one of the favourite medieval etymologies of  ‘Coliseum’ derived the title conveniently from the Latin word for ‘to workship’ (colo, colere).” In the middle supposed to have a huge statue of Jupiter or Apollo symbolising Roman power. Other speculations about its original use include that it was a palace for Vespasian and Titus.

However, through ancient literature research, use of scientific instruments and scrupulous excavations in the following centuries, we “know” now what was its original purpose.

Actually I have not the means nor the time to study the sources, to learn the necessary skills to interpret it, compare and contrast it and therefore have my own personal checkup of it. I have to believe on what so called specialists, books and media state about it. If they now decide that originally it was a Temple of the Sun, what can we do but trust them, as we do now when they say about gladiatorial combats.

I am naturally sceptic and, inspired by the reading of Juan Benet’s La construccion de la torre de Babel, I have decided that my official explanation of the origin of the Coliseum for the next couple of days is going to be that the stones of the building are the very remains of the Tower of Babel. From now on and in the meanwhile, there is not doubt for me that future research will put in evidence the accuracy of this hypothesis.

 
Virtual CGI recreation.

Its construction started by the Catholic Church, driven by a new way of understanding faith in the 6th century, and wanting to prove the power of the pope to get higher than God. It is called ‘Coliseum’ because, although never was finished, it reached almost 7 levels.

The legend of the failure of the project happening due to the diversification of languages came by the determination of Benedict I to give orders to the contractors in Latin, a language they resisted to learn. The construction was in fact abandoned because the lack of slaves, only workers who can be managed by whip commands. After the ‘fiasco’, Latin itself was also abandoned.

The name “Tower of  Babel”  has little to do with Babylon, except by the fact that Luther in his return to Germany after a visit to Rome, called the city “The new Babylon”, horrified by the new buildings projected by the Church. The dome of San Pietro and the Coliseum tower were the two that annoyed him the most. The tower of Babel and the Coliseum are, indeed, the same building.

In 14th century the popes, ashamed by the failure and trying to keep the Church out of it, make it look as a Roman building and invented all kind of cruel and bloody stories to discredit pagan deities.

I read this book about the Roman games

              The Way of the Gladiatorby Daniel F. Mannix

 
Which is to this one I read before

        
                    The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard

Like this film

 
            Ridley Scott’s 2000 Gladiator

To this one.

           Akira Kurosawa’s 198o Kagemusha

The book of Mannix (as the introduction promotionaly points out his name sounds as one of a gladiator)

- uses a literary license that allows him to put names of individuals to the different types of gladiators, their stories made up from very few historical details combined with a lot of invention. This incites identification of the reader with the characters.
- Through writing in a narrative fictional form It makes feel that the cruel and bloody events, though terrible, have nothing to do with our desires and death. This, opposite way, creates distance to the events.
- Put in front the most shocking details, regardless of the historical accuracy.
- Has a lot of comparisons and terms belonging to the contemporary entertainment scene and businesses, to get people in situations they can recognise…
- It has an heroic tone all along.

I shall say that it is a Hollywood book, disguise in friendly historical research. I read it because I found on a website a reference of extreme sexual shows in the Coliseum this book was commenting.

In the other hand, the Hopkins and Beard’s book put in question every traditional information received, confront it with original sources and thru facts and creates a delicate craft that expands all the range of narrative techniques. It mixed rigorous historic research, human condition experiences, create speculatios and some casual humorous comments. Just like Kagemusa. I kind of think also on Andrei Tarkovski’s 1966 Andrey Rublyov or Bergman’s 1982 Fanny och Alexander

One of the ideas that repeately and strongly stretches Mannix is that the games were noble at the beginning, but the desire of blood and shocking spectacle of the audience make them become simply massacres. I think his book also has become victim of the audience desire and is contributing to the massacre of History. Just like Gladiator.

Saiz, Manuel

Coliseum , 2009
Mixed media
188 x 156 x 48.5 mts
Courtesy of the artist

.

The tells of christian martyrdom I read always refer to the death of Jesus. The killing of a christian in the arena doesn’t have the same redemptional effect that the passion of Christ, but his/her sufferings are described in many stories in relation of how diverts from the model. Any assassination of a christian re-enacts in certain measure the inaugural moment of the faith. This might be one of the reasons why the persecution was a failure: the re-enactments (not simple torture and killing) were a powerful promotion agent.

To read the tells of 17th century Japanese christian martyrdoms in Shusaku Endo’s Silence, so similar to the ones in the Roman empire, bring me to a strange similarity.

In many places its possible to find stories of christians who go toward the torture  on singing, without struggling, accepting their fate with joy (for example in Quo Vadis, where this attitude extremely annoys Nero). 

The legend of the martyrs “happily” walking to the lions or the cross has an interesting parallelism with the image of the “exalted” kamikazes in WWII flying straight to crash with the enemy vessels. All the western literature during and post-war had good care of depicting these Japanese pilots as fanatics ready to give their lives for the emperor and a place in the Yasukuni Shrine.

A book called Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers by E OhnukiTierney

selects, reviews and comments the diaries of some university student pilots,  about to perform suicide mission. There were not exactly keen of taking part in the attacks and but rather antiwar. To fail to obey orders would have let themselves and their families in the worst social, economic and emotional situation. As the christians, they accepted their fate with resignation and only external instances created an image  of the sacrifice that can be used instrumentally.

I read few days ago that Martin Scorsese is about to start the production of a film based in Silence. There is one from 1971 by Masahiro Shinoda

A friend in London asked me what was the most interesting thing I found out about the Coliseum. There are many aspects of it at various levels that are being revealing. When I come across some info that matches other I have registered, about my life or my work, an idea comes to life. I write a post about it and the subject is done until new details and ideas on the same theme are found. I think the most surprising and inspiring for me at the moment is the one that continues opening up with new conections and references. This post, therefore, might be long, confuse, perhaps boring.

One of the posibilities I am considering for the final project closing event is a kind of re-enacment of something that has happened in the Coliseum. So many things have happened there! It is not defined yet, just a possibility to get hanging around my thouhgts in the hope it matches something interesting.

For example, those are the type of shows that were put in the Coliseum:

1- Gladiatorial combats
2- Beast hunting
3- Beasts fighting each other.
4- Executions of criminals (including christians) by throwing them to the beasts
5- Other colourful executions of criminals by hunting, burning, disassembling them.
6- Re-enactments of nautical battles
and the very exciting 7- Re-enactments of mythical and heroic stories.

The very special feature of the last one is that criminals were performing small theatre pieces in which they played the role of somebody who died in the story, to finally actually die in the performance. Let’s say that we want to re-enact the death of Laureolus, a famous bandit punished by the Romans: you just get another bandit, re-enact his capture and trial (or similar) to finally nailed him to a cross and let him in a company of a Scotish bear. The historians point out the Prometeic reference, with the guts of the hero eaten once and again by animals. Other plays in the repertory: the story of Attis (who castrated himself) or Hercules (burned alive).

Of course in my final event I cannot compete even by far with the intensity of such re-enactments, but the only thought of it triggers a lot of speculations of the nature of art and representation. I am going to point out some in a very (by now) disordered way.

“Pornography”. A little narrative, very weak, is used just to go directly to the very explicit interest of the audience. There are not film elipsis or suggestions: it is important to see inmeditatelly and by real what the audience wants to see.

“Snuff”. Why to use this narrative? If in pornography the story is just a cover up, in the Coliseum can be an aesthetic element, because before and after this little theatre play you have strict, no frills, bloody killing. At the Coliseum there was even a perverted reverted (perverse) version of the Orpheus ability to charme the animals: the animals did not know the script and despite their role they used to torn apart the actor playing Orpheus.

How important was that the killing was real? In snuff movies the “illusion” of reality (the connection with the refrerence) has to be out of any doubt. This character of reality in the killing was faked succesfully for a while in the popular 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, that worked just fine in some circles. Just as a suggestion: What’s the representational realtionship of this Coliseum representations, porno movies and snuff movies with the story told in the trial and killing of Ceaucescu and wife?

Does the reality of the killing, the contact with the horror, make more artistic the experience? More intense perhaps? It reminds the joke in which a doctor is in a show looking at a yellowish face in a fauvist portrait and when the gallerist ask “what do you think?” the doctor replies: “I would say is Malaria”.

Or in this 30’s Xaudaro’s comic strip.

The lady: I would like to buy this landscape. The critics say that is excellent.
The gentleman: It is up to you, but the painting is worthless. I tell you as the agronomist I am!

In the Coliseum the reality was shown as fiction while the doctor and the agronomist in the fiction they only see the referent.

Few years ago I visited Venus Fort, a shopping mall in Odaiba, Tokyo, which galleries and shop fronts mock Italian streets.

The ceiling of the corridors feels like the sky, and during the day the light changes in a spotless blue italian sky (painted).

At the end of one of the galleries there is a piazza de la Chiesa and some of the galleries crossing are called “della Fontana”.

Japanese employees do small representations dressed as roman soldiers or italian traditional music bands. I thought at that time if, in order to enhance the italian experience of the visitors would be convenient to include some other japanese employees disguised as Napolitan street robbers and pickpockets, that can spoilt shoppers. The wallets could be collected later in a desk at the exit or, for the sake of the real experience, lost them for ever. Normally you leave the shopping mall with less money that you entered, anyway.

Three last things:
The fact of people being killed in the representations makes very confusing the idea of real and fake. Seems that every representation is a presentation, as doesn’t matter the level of reality and accurancy to have a new event. Or in the other hand, however elements of reality you put on it, it never leaves the realm of the representation.

The plays were a repetition of any inaugural moment, artistic or religious. But then, why the body and blood of Christ can be just propped with wine and bread?

These post does imply that I might have seen the Coliseum but doesn’t matter, because conceptually can be the same experience. It could be for the readers, but not for me (for the audience, not for the one-performance-stand actors. I haven’t seen it, anyway.

I came across of this other British inverted Coliseum:

This is Brooklands, in Surrey, one of the first purpose built race tracks in the world.

It is an inverted Coliseum because the spectators are in the middle and the performers are running around.

Built in 1907; closed in 1939; used as an airfield during WWII.

Here, in The Life of Brian 1979 the car race principle is applied to gladiatorial fights in an amphytheatre in Judea.

The winner.

Also the Jewish/British audience having fun.

I was in Manchester for few days for a show, quite far from any Coliseum concern.  However, in the way back to Rome I passed couple of days in London and I went from Manchester to London via Bath Spa, due to a tip that my friend Charo gave me.

Apparently it was a common joke on the 18th century to say that “if the Coliseum were portable, the English would carry it away”.  As they couldn’t carry it, they built something similar in Bath. John Wood Senior and Junior did. It is called The Circus.

As I was getting there from the station I felt the proximity.

(This is an unrelated local pub but since recently Lions thrill me)

Here I am again in front of another Coliseum,

photographed by one of the numerous visitors.

This is an “inverted Coliseum” in which the concept of the inside and outside becomes quite confusing.

Here the proportions with the original.

The orders, Doric, Ionic, Corinthyan, are stacked inspired in the original.

   Third Floor                

Second Floor           

 First Floor            

That was all, for “the inverted Coliseum”, to be inside and outside at the same time.

In London I pass briefly by the “London Coliseum”, the home of the English National Opera.

It is next to a Caffe Nero, “the” Italian Coffee Co.”

And this was the last appearance I got in London.

Today, encouraged by the fact that the exclusion zone map was completed, I did not cared to ask the taxi driver on my way to the airport to avoid the Coliseum.
When I saw the car leading clearly to the Piazza Venezia and the Via dei Fori Imperiali I knew we were going to pass very near. I looked down, ready to endurance the experience.
The GPS of my phone helped me to know my position, to calm my anxiety and therefore to avoid the contemplation.

As I was looking at the mobile I felt we entered in the area of his shadow and perceived the light inside the car decreasing.

I am the red dot.

Going around.

Already left. The red square here is the icon for the underground station.

Few days ago I watched 1950 Jean Cocteau’s Orphee. In this story Eurydice, Orpheu’s wife, dies but he is allowed to go with a guide to the Kingdom of the Deaths and bring her back. The only condition is that he cannot look at her never again.

In this scene he protects himself with his hand, as I did this morning.

Here are Eurydice, Orpheus and the guide.

In this scene, Orpheus find the image of his wife on a magazine. 

Terrified, he covers the image with his hand and shakes his head violently.

 But the guide is there to ease him:

“Your wife’s picture is not your wife”

In Cocteau’s Orphee logic, the forbidden object cannot be looked directly but is allowed to see the pictures of it. However is not allowed to see it on the mirror, and that’s how Orpheus losses her again, when sees her on the rearview mirror of the car. Is your wife your wife’s image in the mirror?

Where should be put the limits in my Collosal Blog project?

1 Not allowed to see it
2 Not allowed to see it in the mirror
3 Not allowed to see moving images of it
4 Not allowed to see photographies of it
5 Not allowed drawings, icons, symbolic images
6 Not allowed to talk about it
7 Not allowed to say the word “Coliseum”
8 Not allowed to think about it
9 Not allowed to remember ever anything about it

But despite one might think reading the previous post, I do not feel very special recently.

In the beginning of the project, when I started the blog, I was bragging about the uniqueness of coming to Rome and not visiting the Coliseum, by the sake of my artistic extravaganza. Now, after learning some about the history of the building, I feel one more in a huge group of people, waiting in a state of high excitement, joy or fear, the very moment in which step into the building. Many are expecting to see the display of blood and death, many tormented by the vision of its death in the area, everyone hoping to leave the premises in the best health.

The term “death panic” is used by one of the SS  Leaders at Treblinka on 1985 Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah. He refers to the state of the prisoners about to get into the gas chamber:
 ”Death panic” makes people let go. They empty themselves, from the front or the rear. So often, where the women stood, there were five or six rows of excrement.

Next to the gates to get into the Coliseum arena, in Roman empire times, ”death panic” and rows of excrements might have been a frequent issue.

I read in Roland Auguet’s  The Roman Games that during the most important gladiatorial games, the city of Rome remained empty, due to everybody was inside the Coliseum attending to the show. A kind of feeling you have in Spain when there is an important (?) football match on TV.

Etore Scola describes a similiar situation in 1977 Una giornata particolare. It tells the story of two people in a deserted Rome at the end of the 30’s while everybody is at Piazza Venezia and Via de Fori Imperiale attending to the Mussolini military parade to honour the visit of Adolf Hitler.

Auguet also says that Seneca sometimes did not go to the games. He liked a quiet Rome to take a walk around the city and think in the way philosophers do. I do understand his reasons if I picture myself working in London the past years during Christmas and Boxing day.

Actually this Coliseum thing is not completely new, as I have quite a long record of not doing things that suppose to be done. The Colossal blog is just an implementation to my art practice of what I have done often in my daily life.  Never been in a football match, never watched one on tv even. Leaving for many years in Madrid as an artist and I never went to the Prado, at first by revelry, and then by habit inertia. Also I remember the familiarity I had in my twenties with all the loonies of my home town. Only artists and mad people do not work at during the day in provincial towns, and we used to meet in the same cafes. 

I find very fruitful for an artist to have this approach to all kind of experiences. It has many cons, though. I am more aware of how I have been using and profiting by them since I am avoiding the Coliseum.

Gladiatorial fights were only the most glamorous shows in the Coliseum, but apparently not the most common. I read about the prisoner executions by fire or beasts, re-enactments of  classical mythological stories and beasts fighting and hunting. These last seem to be very present in the venue. Beasts were brought to Rome from the most remote and exotic places in big quantities. Tigers, lions, elephants, ostriches, alligators, bears, bulls… were hunted in the arena or made fight between them in a type of event called venatio. 

An enormous amount of resources was used in keeping the Coliseum well provided of animals as it is said as many as 5.000 could have been killed in the arena in the course of some single festivals. From all corners of the empire, under the supervision of local authorities, with the help of Roman legions, captured and kept alive for specialists, the animals were collected, fed and transported in all kind of vehicles toward the centre of the world. Special facilities existed in the middle stations and in Rome itself to keep them until their big time arrives.

This one, on the 1957 film 20.000 Miles to Earth has been brought as far as from the planet Venus.

He (she) is bounded to die in the coliseum.

But before that he has performed as expected, fighting with an elephant in front of the Galleria Borghesse en Villa Borghese.

This shot is in front of the Giardino Zoologico.

That looks like this in Google street nowadays.

He deserves some kind of punishment because he has destroyed part of the touristic assets of the city.

Well. These people do not look like the perfect thoughtful archaeologist neither.

From the 19th century and until now, the most exotic artists have been collected from remote corners of the art empire. They have been carefully selected by the local authorities, fed and put in Ryanair type cages by specialists and sent to Rome. We, Spaniards, Germans, Americans, Austrians, French, Venusian… populate the academies, especial dedicated installations to keep us alive as part of the city entertainment. Perhaps at the moment is result of an inertia rather than urgency.

Six years ago I conceived my project If Alive,  in which I started preparing my 65th birthday party 23 years in advance, contemplating the possibility of being a bunch of bones by then. Since then all other projects which span is more than few days share a bit of the tension that If Alive brought to my life.

What if  I NEVER see the Coliseum?

In a way the tension increases when the new project is shorter, as it is of the “not-thought type” the possibility of not being on my feet by the 30th of June.

In the same macabre path, I am considering the possibility of just die precisely on the very same day, while visiting by a sudden attack or accident… to die in the arena. It would be a similar Roman experience that the one of Stourley Kracklite in The Belly of an Architect. A tourist visit sine missione.

The latest gladiatorial fights there is record of happened in 435. How many people have died since then in the arena? For a while it was a castle and perhaps some fighting took place, then some killings by robbers in the 19 century perhaps, revenges might have happened in the fall of fascism, heart attack on a tourist coming up too many stairs… was there a car that crashed against the monument with fatal consequences? This requires further research.

And then, when I was writing this post offline I was stroke by the possibility of not being EVER able to upload it.

Yesterday the map of the exclusion zone was closed. At the moment I have a clear knowledge of which streets i can walk by my self. If you like to avoid the Coliseum, keep it handy: The exclusion zone map

Please note that the accuracy of the map depends of variables of several types. I have identify these:

- Quasi-Permanent. When the Coliseum is hidden behind buildings that are kind of unlikely to be torn down, monumental type. The “quasi” is because it is necessary to contemplate earthquakes and other natural disasters, war, terrorism… that can remove some buildings making the Coliseum visible from some areas that now are allowed. In the other hand, these accidents may also remove parts of the Coliseum, increasing the coliseum view free area.

- Semi-Permanent. Buildings of not especial value can be torn down to make better views of the monumental area, as Mussolini did with the buildings at the Via di Fori Imperiali. Or can be torn down to build new ones, so the accuracy of the map will temporarily change between construction works.

- Seasonal. Especially referred to trees. Before and after the pruning, or the leaf falling.

(It is behind those trees)

- Accidental. I tend not to include these. They are temporary structures like booths for fairs, advertishing or building sites. Perhaps a truck strategically parked.

- Ad Hoc. These are not taken in account but, of course, can make the map completely invalid. They are blindfolds, scuba equipment, motorcycle helmets used with the face part back, etc.

Yesterday a new record in overground proximity was established, so the walk was very exciting again. In couple of places I almost felt the gravitational attraction of the stone mass.

I have been as close as this. Here is a picture from 1 taken by my guide.

And from 2

If you look carefully in the top left side of the picture there is a palm tree.

So this is from another point of the touring.

Finally, here I am at the Via Labicana.

The furthest builidng before the Coliseum is the Hotel Gladiatori, where I plan to spend the last night of my residency.

People coming to my studio and seeing the papers I have covering the window towards the Coliseum or simply knowing for the first time about my project are suspicious about my strict observance of the essential rule of the Colossal blog. I haven’t seen it, I swear. The tension is maintained because it is not possible to prove effectively that I haven’t seen it. On the contrary it is possible easily to bear evidences of the very moment I see it, so see it  will release all the pressure. Even more: once I see it nobody has a reason to claim for evidence of it.

Also in Lyotard’s The Differend we can read about the tension created in the Nazi scenario: only the Germans are suspect of being Jews, and the tension is maintained while it is necessary to probe it to keep certain status. For the ones who have been already proclaimed Jews there is not tension anymore. Horrible future but not tension about their condition of doom. To bear a proof that somebody is Jew was much easier than probing Arian ascendancy.

And in Bataille: the power of the lord over the slave is to keep him alive, not to kill him, to maintain this tension of survival and surrender . If the slave is killed, all the fun is gone.

It might be another inconsistency of Christians being eaten by lyons in the Coliseum sequence of Quo Vadis. A very good book about the Coliseum written by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard affirms that there are not records anywhere of Christians being killed on the Coliseum. Many authors say that this is part of the Catholic Church hijacking of the building, that included the installation of a big cross on the centre of the arena that stayed there many years and the creation of chapels on the arches…

From the point of view of the Church to negate the killing of the Christians in the arena is the same that from the point of view of the Jewish, to negate the holocaust. Lyotard says: “Even as the deniers’ work is an effort to continue the Final Solution by silencing all testimony about it from survivors, they have a point when they claim that there are no witnesses to the gas chambers since every true witness was exterminated in the process”. For Lyotard the task of thinkers, writers and artists becomes not to represent Auschwitz, which is impossible, but to bear witness to this impossibility.

Hooligans having good time.

Jean Francois Lyotard. The Differend

The destruction of Rome depicted in The Core is set in a near future. The plot of the film is quite dubious, as the catastrophe is caused by the magnetic fields created by the sudden stop of the magmatic inner core of the Earth. But the heroes go down there, set a sequence of nuclear explosions, the core starts moving again and the apocalyses is postponed.  All in 135 minutes and colour.

However the Coliseum would have been destroyed forever. In the parallel fictional history that the movie kicks out, the authorities might reconstruct it. It would be interesting to see how they decided in which point in history to take the model for the reconstruction. At the end it might be like the Verona Arena, perfectly shaped for opera and events. In a parallel fiction world.

If this is the limit of the coliseum in the future, there is a limit also in the past, when the city of Rome was burnt. After some researching I learnt that it is not clear that Nero gave orders to start the fire, as popular culture affirms. Here is him contemplating the spectacle in Quo Vadis.

The space left empty by the fire supposed to be used for big architectural developments of the city Nero had planned, many of them part of a palace and a lake for his own use.

In this land was built later on the Coliseum. once Nero died. So there i a historic inconsistency in Nero Burning Rom logo.

Also in the fact of Nero attending to the killing of Christians in a questionable Coliseum like building in Quo Vadis.

It could be the Circus Maximus, but looks a bit too rounded, the tribune too near of the round part of the stadium. I think the Art Director of the film had fun mixing popular ideas of how this Chistians killing took place.

Quo Vadis  1951

One of the strategies to deal with something that you cannot acquire, posses or control is to destroy it.

I could identify the idea of destruction in few angles of the Colossal blog experience. It works for some people who, after learning of my project, threat me to bring me to the sight of the Coliseum by force, even by the use of chloroform. Everything that is pure should be soiled, as it could be implied by a casual reading of the second law of thermodynamics. 

But mine would be even more miserable, jelousy aproach: “if I cannot see it, nobody should see it”. Reversing the power of the magnetic forces around Claudius described in post #14 that my desire has created I can start achiving some results here.

Ops, some collateral damage.

These are images from The Core 2003

As long as the Coliseum stands, Rome will stand as well; when the Coliseum falls, Rome will fall and when Rome falls, the end of the world will follow… said Beda in the 7th Century (thanks Daniel).

Last Saturday, on the occasion of my anniversary, I went on a tour to the EUR, in the south of Rome. The EUR is an urban area planned and half built in the beginning of the 1940’s by the fascist government. EUR stands for Esposizione Universale Roma. Wikipedia.

At first I was expecting to find good locations for other projects. I thought it was not going to be a very Colossal blog related day though, except for one of the buildings in the complex.

But it started differently as, in order to get there, my train had to stop at the Coliseum tub station. This is, absolutely, the closest I have ever been to the building. It is, also absolutely, a station exactly like the others in the Roman subway network. But, why your heart pounds when you know somebody loved is calling, if the ring of the handset is the same than when it is the “Direct Kitchens Special Winter Offer” sales agent?

The building I wanted to visit is right at the exit of the EUR station. It is the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana 

It is known as the “Colosseo Quadrato” (square Coliseum).

But luckily now these days this can be easily changed with Photoshop.

There are other interesting buildings, like the Palazzo dei Congressi, were many films have been shot, as Fellini’s 8 e mezzo, or the fungus tower, portrayed in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse.

But there is also the Museo della Civiltá Romana that, apart of big spaces, empty of tourists, specialists or any public at all, and beautiful backdrops for video art works features

one

two

three

and four Coliseums

It is there, in the middle of this big model of the city during the Roman empire times.

1999 Julie Taymor’s Titus, is a movie based in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicusis filmed both in classical and fascists era locations and mixing them very nicely. There is a special link between these two architectures. The Colosseo Quadrato plays a big role on the film but, perhaps for production reasons, the rounded one is not featured in the film.

I do not know were they shot these classical scenes.

 Let’s say that the EUR is a parallel Rome, a ”square Rome”.

Titus 1999

I found this beautiful pot for tips in one of my usual coffee suppliers.

The regulars are too generous and do not keep the conceptual elegance of just dropping five cent coins (and too stingy to drop sestertius).
I thought that bringing this into the Coliseum would start creating some Matryoshka doll implications.

As the royalty portrayed in coins, getting older with the new mintages, the Coliseum was also young once. There were the times of the previous European single currency, the sestertius.

At that time the protocol to treat Eurosceptics was different than now.

Apart of the Arena and Giulietta e Romeo (see how explicit iconography in front of the arena)

the other highlight of Verona is Emilio Salgari (1862-1911). He wrote many adventure novels, set in the most remote exotic places without leaving Italy, an armchair adventurer. However he took great care in make think the public that his novels were somehow result of personal experiences. Here is in a mock Indian location, probably set few metres away of the Verona arena.

By the end of the residency I am going to be a Coliseum specialist who has wrote many articles about it and never seen the actual building.

Today I realised that I had several coliseini on my pocket.

I checked: Verona’s arena is NOT on the 2 cents nor on the 1 cent coins.

1- Coliseum
2- San Pietro
3- Monument to Vittorio Emanuele
4- Spanish Academy

In The Belly of an Architect the character confronts the coliseum with the dome of San Pietro, looking at them from the monument to Vittorio Emanuele.

From the two windows of my estudio at the academy it is possible to see the two buildings almost at the same distance. It could be said that the orientation of the building of the academy has been decided considering the relationship with them.

I have been asked many times why I have chosen the Coliseum and not San Pietro for this project.
There are many reasons. One important is practical: it would be very difficult to avoid the view of the dome. It is so enomously arrogant that it would have been a very difficult task to mantain such tension for 8 months.

But I think the main reason is that it refers too directly to the idea of “centre”. San Pietro would not have been an axis for my circumvallations decided by me in any aspect. God, power, church, money, pilgrimage… everything is pertaining to a very established existing reference point.

Years ago I was in a residency at Delphi in Greece. This town was the centre of the world for long time. The Delphic oracle was located in a temple on the side of Mount Parnassus there.

For the 2,300 inhabitants of the town Delphi is still the centre. My address there was: Hotel Delphi, Delphi, Greece. When I asked if there was nothing else, a post code, region, something…  the man at the post office was proud to say that there was no way to miss it as “everybody knows Delphi”.

At the museum it is possible to see the Omphalos, the navel of the world, through which is possible to comunicate with the gods.

At that time (1994) I was thinking about the importance of the centre, its disparation, the concept of “rhizome”. I was reading Lyotard and Baudrillard and working about it. I made a show called Metaphysics of Training. This two mobile centres belong to it:

The idea of “absolute centre” is as obsolete as the idea of god. The importance of the coliseum is more contemporary, related to entertainment and virtual politics. The coliseum is a dynamic operative operational centre.

A good way to feel back in the Roman track after celebrations and travelling is to watch Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect. The film is beatifully shot and portraits in a very interesting manner the relationship with the monumental architecture of the city with an individual person’s (artist/architect) contemporary troubles.

Along the film many buildings and piazzas of Rome and described, shown and documented. The coliseum only appears for half of a second, but for me is present all the time. I can map it perfectly out of the frame in shots in which other buildings are protagonists. I never had before such an awareness of a film location just by watching the film. In each shot I reconstruct the relationship of the buildings with the coliseum and the space between.

Actually a big part of the story happens in the monument to Vittorio Emanuel, explored for post number 28.

This is the hottest scene in the film:

“Over there you can see the coliseum…”

“There, Michelangelo’s Dome of San Pietro…”

Actually I am quite doubtful of the direction in which the actor is pointing at when he talks about the coliseum. In the case of San Pietro I think he is more accurate. But the picture is nicer if he is on profile when pointing.

This is a minor detail if compared with this scene of John Frankenheimer’s Year of the Gun. This is a pre-Basic Instinc Sharon Stone’s movie, not exactly first grade. It is about terrorism in Italy in the 70’s. The main character, the journalist David Raybourne, played by Andrew McCarthy, runs away from a house in one of the streets that lead to the coliseum.

The poor guy cannot contain himself and looks at it.

But he is actually turning because some policemen are chasing him.

It is not very clear why the next shot is this one:

How the policemen have got here, much closer to the coliseum than before? Also is interesting to point out the particular pan-and-scan decision, that takes out most of the action to favour the coliseum.

Next shot:

and finally:

Definitely Frankenheimer is as big fan of the coliseum as I am, ready to present it in its best in his film even if spoiling the continuity.

The Belly of an Architect 1987
Year of the Gun 1991

Verona’s arena is a model of coliseum by downscaling all its features.

The training facilities at the school of gladiators of Lentulus Batiatus, as portrayed in Kubrick’s Spartacus, are a model of the coliseum made by reducing it strictly to its functionality.

Here in operation:

This is a model of the coliseum reduce to its souvenir and fetichist functions:

A sign model of Verona’s arena.

And of the coliseum (as photographed by Fernando, a fellow grantee)

Spartacus (1960)

The Verona’s Arena is certainly a lower key coliseum: less spectators, less tones of precious marble, less important celebrities on the VIP seats… I guess also the shows must be lower quality, for provincial people, etc.

I read somewhere (perhaps in Claudio Magris’ L’annelo di Clarisse) that during the Austro-hungarian empire all the theatres within the limits of the empire kept in every show the best seats empty, just in case the Emperor, suddenly, being in the area decide to attend to the play. I can imagine that sometimes Roman Emperors like to watch a combat when passing through Verona in their way to some import-export market expansion ventures in Germania. So the quality of the VIPs could be sometimes at its best.

But it is difficult for me to imagine gladiators on an empire tour, doing gigs in a small circus far from Rome. The life of a well trained, spectacularly built gladiator cannot be spared in a corner of the empire for the amusement of second class citizens. In this sense I find the criteria must be similar to bull fighting, in which the best bulls are always sent to main arenas, advertished as such, while the lower class animals are sacrified to provincial festivals. This doens’t mean that the good animals are always better: by the very reason of their perfect breed, could be more predictable and less interesting show business-wise than the ones whose training has not being closely monitored (you can read “artists” here too, in the place of “animals”).

Only a short speculation: the christians to murder were local, the gladiators were coming from abroad to kill them in low risk shows, as the toreadores travel from festival to festival killing bulls.

Boxing champions only fight in the main arenas. A theatre play can be sometimes performed better out of Broadway, if by unforseen conditions the actors are more inspired that night, or are feeling less pressure than in a principal venue. An art biennial in a small remote town can be more independent of market and the gallery lobbies than the Venice one. An experience in a second line tourist attraction can be stronger due to the reduced number of fellow tourists present. Movies are essentially projected in the same conditions in every corner of the Hollywood empire.

This is a New Year picture. And no, I haven’t been guided to the Coliseum blindfolded and posed for the picture here without seeing the building at my back.

This is the Verona arena, much colder and Swiss than the coliseum (notice the snow).

For New Year I wanted a physical coliseum experience, so I went to Verona to see the most similar to it that exists in the surroundings.

The welcome at the Verona Porta Nouva station was very promissing.

Coliseum imaginery and a circular train like the one in post number 25

Then at the hotel

The next day was snowing. The building feels small, if compare with my mental picture of the Roman one. It is well built and perfectly rounded shape. There is also a remaining of larger previous glory.

Daniel, my travel mate suggested that considering how neat and perfectly rebuilt is the arena, the mayor should remove this annoying piece of ruin. Instead of it, I think they are planning to make it look as the rest of the building. At the moment this is its aspect.

The interior is functional and renovated. It seems that at some point most of the stones in the gradate have been replaced.

It it used for concerts and opera. The entrance to the building was 6 euros, without any bonus, not even gladiators dying in the arena. It is interesting to point out that the steps were extremly slippery, very dangerous. The management hasn’t spread salt to avoid ice, not even broomed the snow,  and I can imagine that the day would have finished with several tourists on the floor. This safety and health level would cause major heart functioning anomalies to any British surveyor.

Some other nice details of the visit. Here there is a link to other of the posts:

There are two representational levels in this picture for me, as there are pointing to other buildings by different means. 
From the top, the tip of the Eiffel tower also links with the Veronese Lamberti tower, one of the landmarks of the city. Lamberti tower is not here on behalf of any other building.

In front of the arena there is another later building with a coliseum look, that reminds me the one in Nuremberg.

Finally, here is a beatiful view of the type that visits my most nightmarish nights (if seing in Rome).

All in all, my experience of visiting the Verona arena is kind like a shot of methadone for a morphine addict.

Or even better. Considering

- the make up (the gradate pretty well restored)
- that it is a place that can be visited without restrictions (it is always solicitous)
- that you have to pay a fee to enter (Coliseum is free for the fellows of the Spanish Academy)
- the horrible Christmas star decoration that comes out of it

- the physical danger
- and the insatisfaction when I left the building,

it was more like visiting a professional when you cannot spend time with the loved one.

I seems that if I have to give a quick description of what this project is about I should only say that it is a “Psychogeographic case study”.

Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as the “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Another definition is “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities…just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.

From Wikipedia

Read in David Mamet’s Bambi vs. Godzilla: The dramatic experience is essentially the enjoyment of the postponement of the enjoyment.

To delay the moment of visiting the Coloseum has a dramatic effect. It is an open situation that creates tension: of seeing it accidentally, of compulsory controlling each movement, of being different to the normal people, o being vulnerable to, for example, a taxi driver, of being impaired or to demand violation. This is an area fruitful for suspense.

The touristic experience, as Baudrillard would say, is that of the pornographic realm. Everything is allow, open, illuminated, there are not barriers. What is going to happen is arranged and known. The tourist is always stimulated for primary, secondary, tertiary targets. As the experience doesn’t progress, same stimulation repeated, there is not place for fulfilment: there is always a new target to cover, for minor that it can be, always a possibility left for repeating the experience.

The Colossal Blog, as a work of art, will have a closing event, an apotheosis where all the elements of the project would get tied up.

At the moment the best choice for me is to spend the last night of the residency at the best suite of the hotel Gladiatori and have breakfast at the terrace.

This can give me kind of fullfilment, I think.

The Hotel Gladiatori Palazzo Manfredi enjoys an exceptional location in the heart of ancient Rome, with rooms and a rooftop terrace directly overlooking the Coliseum.

Past

Future

Retrofuture

La Decima Vittima (1965)

Few days ago another anonym postcard arrived.

 It is the same handwritting than the previous. This one is stamped in Venice. I got a graphologist, dna anylisis, fingerprints expert, and all the information crossed with the list of producers and sellers of this type of postcard. The circle is getting smaller.

(I guess this post is going to be very descriptive, so please skip it if you are not into the practicalities of avoiding the Coliseum).

The motto of yesterday’s expedition was “The circle should be closed”. Starting at the monument of Vittorio Emanuel and moving anti clockwise we wanted to do a very systematic drawing of the exclusion zone.

We beggined in this corner (1), the further you can go East. Then we started the turn towards the west, always trying to explore any new possibility to go East. The first was to climb the stairs up to the building.

Here (2) my guide could finally take a beautiful picture of both of us together (C. and I). I drag myself along the wall until my guide said “stop” to me. Head U-turn not allowed.

It is not possible to get to the very top of the building, because the panoramic elevators are on the Coliseum side of the building (3). We asked for the staircase but the guards were not very cooperative.

I am planning to come back and ask again adducing claustrophobia to see if there is a more merciful guard.

Next area was the Piazza Campidoglio (4) with the Marcus Aurelius statue. Beatiful square designed by Michelangelo for the Pope to impress Charles V. It has two dangerous spots. (The camera icon is at the panoramic elevators of the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele).

Continuing turn to the East we descended the monte Tarpeo until via della Consolazione. There somebody who want to help has put a sign to tell me that I cannot continue to the Foro Romano.

Few streets later, at the via di San Teodore, an ambush was prepared. The Coliseum is at the other side of this wall.

Walking carelessly along the wall, this was waiting for me at the window in the middle:

Fortunatelly my guide was alert and my virginity was saved.

In the whole day we drawn near 60 degrees of an exhaustive research circle around the Coliseum. The exclusion zone

I went to London on a quick trip to present a film. My friends there have followed my Coliseum fortunes: “What the driver said when you took the cab in London Bridge and asked him not to pass near the coliseum?” told one of them.

The Coliseum theme spread beyond the Roman limits and appears in all the terminations of my net extensions. Everywhere I go, in the header of every conversation, there is a little coliseum info exchange.

In London, due to I know where I am all the time, the navigating experience is different than in Rome, where the coliseum can be around the corner. It is also different of Paris in which although I do not know what is around the corner, I know there is not a coliseum threat. A clasification of expectations.

Apparently this winter is especially rainy in Rome. I did not expect this: even the sunniest days you have to put your umbrella in the bag just in case.

Yesterday I went out for a walk and it was raining for a while in a pace very much playing with the limit in which to open the umbrella is justified. I admit that this limit could be quite soaking for a Londoner. There are other cities much more umbrella-release-button-happy than London like for exemple Tokyo. But also here the people open quickly the umbrellas as soon as the first drops come, if not for better reason, to avoid the annoying offerings of a myriad of umbrella street sellers.

Getting wet with my umbrella kept warm and dry in my cozy bag I recalled the joke that Baudrillard says in L’illusion de la fin: There is a man walking under the rain with a closed umbrella under the arm. When somebody ask him why he doesn’t open it he replies: ” I do not like to feel on the limit of my possibilities”.

I reserve the coliseum because I do not want Rome to live on the limit of its possibilities. Perhaps I am afraid of Rome not being at one point of my stay good, entertaining, exciting, spectacular, beautiful or scarry enough. If so, then I will be able to say: “well, I still have the coliseum to try”.

“What’s this story of reaching your own limit?” Baudrillard says, “it is a fantasy of death, that doesn’t allow other alternative that downfall and decay” (sorry, translated to Spanish by somebody else and then to English now).

This morning one of my mates at the academy asked me during breakfast if my Coliseum project has to do with “desire”.
- Yes. By refraining of visiting it I increase my desire, I acummulate desire.
- with renunciation?
- Of course. It is a training for renunciate to other things and appreciate what you have.
- with control?
- It is all about control…

The fact is that this project uses a technique to work and think I just discovered. By giving an extreme importance to something in time or space (better if by default has not importance at all) you can relate everything to it. Either because is similar or because is disimilar. As all the cilinder like objects can be related to the coliseum by similarity, all the ones that are not can be also related by its lack of cilinderness. All themes that usually are wandering around my head can be inserted in a coliseum pod bay. If it doesn’t work in the straigt form, I try it in reverse.

I used the same technique (I know now) in if alive, the project about my 65 birthday party I talked about before. By giving this high importance to a banal event as a birthday party of the future, one more among many others, everything can be related to it. Actually the main purpose was to have some certainties on life: since I started the if alive project my death only can happen in two moments: I can die either before or after the party. It is quite a reduction.

A friend sends me this drawing. It has to do with my next project after Rome, a circular train that it is so precise that gives the time (keep tuned if you want to know more).

This train depicted here, has been discovered apparently as the very first train in history for passangers. It was an English atraction called Catch Me if You Can. But also people know it as “steam circus”.
Here is the full story, interesting also because it is about the drawings of the train, an not the train itself:

http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh_gfx_en/ART58789.html

Jaime sends me these images from Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, as he said in his comment some posts ago.

This is what Monica Vitti is looking at:

He thought this was the coliseum, but actually is the Verona Arena, an amphiteatre from AD 30.

It has a kind of similar history than the coliseum but only held 30,000 people (instead of the 80,000) and was pink (due to the limestone of Valpolicella). As the coliseum it suffered also an eathquake and it was peeled for being used as a quarry.

But this one looks more complete, like the digitally reconstructed image for Gladiator.

Here are couple more of them:

Nimes Anphiteatre (France)

The tall, elongated, arenaless, leaning coliseum of Pisa.

Viddy well, my little brother. Viddy well.

L’Eclisse 1962

Gladiator 2000

Just another quick comment on architectural conection of Rome with Nazi Germany.

These are the Spanish Steps at the Piazza di Spagna by Alessandro Specchi

Fassbinder shot here the beggining of Martha with cinematographer Michael Bauhaus (both in the picture). In this scene the father of the leading character dies of a heart attack while in the stairs.

These are also known as Spanish stairs.

They are in Mauthausen and were mainly built by Spanish Republican soldiers that escaped from Franco after the defeat in the civil war only to fall into German hands in France. Many of them died in the construction.

There were called “Stairs of Death”. This picture is with a Russian soldier after the liberation of the camp.

Martha (1974)

The object of my map and the need of a guide through the city is not that I will become marble if I am exposed to the light that has been projected by the Coliseum, but rather to establish an area in which I can walk by my self safely.

When I went to the aiport for Paris I had to cross the city very early in the morning to get to Termini train station. I took the H bus, which has known compatibility issues with Coliseum avoiders. I knew that in Piazza Venezia, for around 40 metres, the bus passes a zone from which you can see it. So in arriving to the spot, I closed my eyes and very soon the danger was over.

But two days later I was coming back late in the night, after a long day with meetings in Paris, trains, buses, plane, etc things were not that easy. I took the same bus and the route was the same. I arrived near the Piazza and I closed my eyes. I opened it and the it was over. Good. But then, the bus got a different street I never went before, turning around the monument of Vittorio Emanuel. I got in panic and I started closing and opening the eyes, turning my head kind of histerical. Then, at one awful moment I opened the eyes to see this:

what the f is this?

I couldn’t believe it. I should be very far. It is like in Asteroids or Defender when, being in danger to be hit by a rock or enemy bullet you press the hyperspace button, only to appear in a lethal spot.

Asteroids

Defender

It was a very stressing moment. The tide of emotion which overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it scarce was to be distinguished from religious doom.

This morning I went there again just to verify that it is the Teatro Marcello. Please examine how it looks by night according Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_Marcellus

This is the same street in the opposite sense.

The Coliseum is actually at the other side of the monument to Vittorio Emanuel. Really far. I might have been also as far as Nurenberg, where Hitler ordered to build this Congress Hall after his visit to Rome, next to the grounds for his spectacular rallies.

Taken from http://cyan.rrx.ca/rally.shtml with thanks.

I went to Paris for couple of days, but I did not get lunch at the tour Eiffel. When I arrived I learned that the Maupassant syndrome is so spread, so many people hate the tower, that it is almost impossible to get a reservation for lunch at the restaurant.

It was interesting to experience how different feels the city when you get lost and can walk for 20 minutes by streets you do not know with the certaincy that there is not going to be a coliseum around the next corner. It makes you careless, the whole city becomes flat.

But I might have been in danger. When I checked my email at the Centre Pompidu cafe (very comfortable) I read a message from my friend warning me: from the top of the tower, in very clear days, perhaps you can see accidentally the coliseum if looking in Rome direction. I laughed. Thanks.

I cannot say that the fact of not seing the Coliseum has changed clearly my life, as it has been allways my custom not to see it at all. However the proximity of it, and the constant invitation of breaking this rule, is something new that creates many disturbances on my thinking and daliy life.

There is another clear disturbance of my daily life if compared to London: I used to see at least one branch of Starbucks every day and I have not see any since I am here. However there is not tentation nor possibility of doing it.

I read Internet forums in which Starbucks lovers complain about the lack of stores in Rome. They wonder why there is not implantation of the company in here, especulating about sociology and economics. My own speculation: all the good premises are already taken by the Catholic Church. They have been earlier in looking for the best spots. Even MacDonals cannot afford here but little scruffy shacks.  

Catholic Church Headquarters (Vatican city)

Starbucks Coffee Company Headquarters (Seattle)

Starbucks stores in Rome

Catholic churches in Seattle.

Starbucks followers in Rome

Today I requested the help of my guide again to come back to the spot we went the other day.

In the streetview service of Google I couldn’t see the Coliseum from this point, so I wanted to check it up again.

I thought that perhaps she saw a different building and missrecognize it due to the excitement and responsability.
Or that the Coliseum had the same confuse inductive power that Solaris’ swirling ocean like surface.

But that was not the case. Actually I just “went” too far in the google street. If get back couple of clicks, the picture matches the one Ana took today.

After establishing that no further approach was possible by this path, we went East to try to make the ring around smaller. I have updated the map:

“the exclusion zone map”

Today was not as exciting as before to be one step next to the end of the project. It is incredible how something can become routine in just two tries.

San Pietro, Rome

Coliseum, Rome

Plaza de toros de Las Ventas, Madrid

Yankee Stadium, NY, NY

It well might have been that I have seen the coliseum already many times. Perhaps I see it every morning when I wake up and look by the allowed window.

My marble expert friend also sends me this quote:

“The Colosseum was leased as a quarry by the Popes: picking up one receipt in the Vatican archive we see a payment of 205 ducats for the removal of 2,522 tons of stone between September 1451 and May 1452…..The lime-burning which Pius II and Raphael decried was the most banal, yet most destructive, aspect of the recycling. In mixing mortar the best aggregate is powdered lime, and the easiest way to obtain powdered lime is to burn marble.”  Woodward, C. In Ruins Chatto and Windus. 2001

As the actual basilic of San Pietro started to be built on the 1506, it is not unlikely that some of those very stones are from the coliseum. In a very postmodern baudrillardean style, the coliseum has spread to be part of every monument of the city. While we inhale non-stop part of the last Nero’s breath.

It reminds me something that the director of the Reina Sofia Art Centre in Madrid said few days ago about a 30 tons Richard Serra sculpture that dissapeared some years ago (before he started in the post): half of Spaniards might be shaving with parts of Serra’s work.

Is this the Coliseum?

Yesterday also, I received a post card in the mail.

It is a normal picture of the coliseum from a point of view in which it looks like a default backdrop monument.

It has arrived without known sender.

At first I thought was very nice detail of somebody, but during the day I start hesitating if I should call Forensic police. Like in Robert Altman’s The Player It is becoming kind of threatening. If an anonimously delivered dead fish for Italian mafia means “you are going to sleep with the fishes” this postcard could be telling me: one day you will bump into it unwillingly.

Senders please identify.

The Player

Yesterday I got a new studio in the Academy, which is much nicer, bigger and high up.

It has two huge beatiful windows.

One is looking North, and you can see San Pietro’s dome among many other things.

The other is looking East, as those who can, would be able to see the coliseum from here.

Marco wrote from London with a quote by Roland Barthes on The Eiffel Tower and other Mithologies:

“Maupassant was but one of a fair number of 19th-century Parisians who did not care for the Eiffel tower; indeed, he often ate lunch in the restaurant at its base, not out of any preference for the food, but because it was only there that he could avoid seeing its otherwise unavoidable profile.”

The conection is the ability of both buildings to organice the city in your mind around them. It’s says like the contextual menu in Google maps: “center the map here”. In few days I am going to Paris and I will try to eat lunch at the Eiffel tower to feel companionship.

I see my time in Rome going to be very productive. Parallel to this project of not visiting the Coliseum I am doing another one of not visiting the Taj Mahal during this 8 months.

I haven’t been in India. I am not in India. It is very unlikely I will be in India in the next 8 months.

It would be very easy and futile for the coliseum thing to stay the whole day working at the studio, never go out for visiting people or places, do not take public transport at all… It would have been very eficient way to carry out this project to stay in London the whole duration of the residency. One of the principals of art projects is that all the rules are operative, that there is nothing to hold on, everything is capricious. The excitement is to put limits and then test it. As in one of Blake’s programatic Proverbs of Hell, you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

So yesterday I went to a dinner party a friend was organizing in the south east of the city. A careless travel from the Academy to there probably would have pass directly by the Coliseum. Therefore I got the usual 2-rides-squared-route diversion tactics. After a nice dinner, good food and conversation, and warm encounter with old friends and promising new ones, I started feeling the londoner’s last train syndrome. I discovered than this urgency I was experimenting is so alien to Rome as the Stendhal syndrome would be to Birmigham.

To walk couple of hours in the night, with some glasses on wine in my body, in a city I do not know, with the “restrictions” I have (that make complicated taxi and night buses) was not very appealing so, regardless the animation of the conversation, I started making moves to leave. As it is known in Italy takes very long to say goodbye and the conversation must continue standing, with the door of the flat open at least for 15 more minutes. I benefited of the charme of Italian night life because I did not need to take the public transport nor to walk due to my friend Anna was kind enough to give me a ride in her Fiat 500.

This feels like a very Roman experience.

Sarah, an American Filmmaker who knows well the city, came with us and got the leadership. She was aware of my “condition” and planned the trip to avoid the monument. But as I recognized the San Giovanni district, I started to feel a bit anxious. It is the area already explored few days ago. Approaching a corner I knew as dangerous, before we got the diversion turn that threw us back to the hyperspace, I felt like jumping out by the window (if only would have been allowed for back riders by the design of the car). It were only few moments of stress and then everything was passed.

Once you go to a party, have drinks, seat in a car you are not driving, in a city that it is not yours, you are in danger. Once you start on this downward trip you never know where you’ll land. There is many a man who can date his ruin from a some dinner party that he though little of at the time.

Magnetic power lines around Clavius Coliseum

2001: A Space Oddysey (1968)

Today I have been closer to the Coliseum than ever in my life, which is 582.57 metres away.

Ana, one of my fellow “inmates”, was kind enough to walk with me around the area. We were trying to reach a theatre in the via Capo d’Africa, where in few days there is a show I would like to attend to. It is very close to the Coliseum, and the task seemed not to be very easy.

Here is the map of what we did:

    “the exclusion zone map”

We planned the expedition carefully, like a military operation. Map, satelite printouts, GPS…
From Metro San Giovani we went west to avoid the streets that point directly to “It” like Via Labicana. We try to get to the north from the side. The area is quite enclosed, with a big hospital, military facilities, private colleges and villas . The blocks are very wide, so it is not easy to get shortcuts. Everything pushses you to the main streets that give straight view to it.

It is behind this hospital but both side streets are straight into it.

This is the closest we got. From where my guide is, she can see the building around the corner on the right. If I can only walk few metres and enter in the church in front, perhaps could be possible to get to the gardens behind and then to the group of blocks we were aming to. But at that moment I thought it was not fair just to close the eyes without thinking for a while in other possibilities. Perhaps in a future visit.

I dreamt to be like Edmund Hillary and Tenzing, but we could not reach the objective.

Latest news: The other artists of the Academy were, at the same time, visiting the Coliseum. Fernando, the photography fellowship holder, took a picture of them inspired on those of this blog.

Although subjective, the main similarity by far between the Coliseum and contemporary hospitals for me is that I do not want see any of them in the next 8 months.

However there are other (minor) resemblances about which I am going to speculate in the table below.

The coliseum and the hospital are devices that allow controlled interactions on all these elements in a complex structure.

• Both have a dedicated building that has to be designed specifically for the function
• All the people involved can be at one point eventually patients/victims
• It is a big economic effort for the regional administration
• It shows the wealth of the state and its people
• Users get angry when quality of the service drops
• All participants on it are going to die (some with no time to salute)

(end of metaphoric delirium)

The main objective similarity is that both combine in the same place cutting edge technology and a sophisticated management of people and supplies with the most extreme and primitive emotions.

San Pietro Rioja Salud amphitheatre, La Rioja (Spain).

I ordered 300 of these to a factory in Torino to be distributed through the city. It will help me and German turists to walk cheerfully in many city spots.

DIN 1451 Engschrift™ Package Font

(Deutsches Institut für Normung)

I have been few days in Rome and I went thought a lot of the Coliseumnism already. I hope to take it easier soon, because at the moment I spend almost the whole day thinking about it. 8 months is a lot of time.

I am thinking what will happen once the term of the residency is finished. Will it make any sense to go and visit it? Should I continue my project forever… FOREVER!

No. It is better to see it right at the end of the residency. I do not want the Coliseum to be the centre of my world once I leave Rome. I do not want to have this black hole, this blind spot in my back, to which every place I arrive in the future can be related. I need to cancel it. The Coliseum is a place of power over me just because I decide so and I will decide the end of it as well.

I will take a look of it on the 30th of July.

I have this project, if alive, that consist in preparing my 65 years birthday party. The day of the party I will have been 24 years preparing the party. I can imagine the feeling the day after as of “emptyness”.  The visit to the Coliseum could be an experience to foresee how I will feel on the 11th of January of 2026.

My friend Jonathan sent me this nice picture from his documentation about the history of marble.

He came for a visit in May 1938 with Mussolini.

He came for a visit in 1972 with Chuck Norris.

 He came for a visit in 1953 with Audrey Hepburn.

Roman Holiday
Meng long guo jiang

I had good comments from people I tell about this project. It is kind of inspiring and provocking for me and for the ones who heard about it.

Especially my comrades at the Academy, who seem to be interested in the development. As many of them are discovery the city like me, this absurd restriction creates certain kind of attraction . Some told me that they recall me when they passed nearby by public transport.

Different levels of access to things creates tension. I am thinking at the right to crossing borders depending of passports, for example. This tension was well portrayed by Santiago Sierra in “his” pavillion at the Venice Biennale.

As for Sierra’s, the fact that it is just an almost random decision (not so random at last) makes it more appealing.

Prohibition enhaces desire. The key word for this project is “perversion”, a kind of fetichism that looks for “everything around the thing but the thing itself”. The restriction makes me desire to see the coliseum as I ever expected I was going to desire.

Before yesterday I went to visit 1:1 projects and had to take a long walk circumvallating anything that could be a bit dangerous coliseumwise.

A map showing the safe zones that I have already explored could be useful for move more freely.

View Map

I will update the map with the areas that I have visited. At certain moment I might have a “blind person’s guide” (lazarillo) who can help me to tour around the streets near the coliseum and draw a precise map of the “Exclusion Zone”.

When I talked about this project at my gallery, Clara told me about her cousin and aunt. They were visiting Rome for few days and the aunt, an elderly and religious person, did not want to pass near the coliseum. She cannot understand how people want to visit a place where so many christians were tortured and murdered.

I got a similar impression when visited coupled of months ago the concentration camp Sachsenhausen near Berlin.
I felt akward seing visitors in the same actitud you can see in the Grand Canyon or (let’s say it) Eurodisney. In the tourism phenomenom everything gets crushed into a compact form.
Curiously enough most of the visitors the day I went were German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, the evil axis nations in the 40s. I did not see English or American People. I did not recognised Slavic faces.

Maybe to be interested in visiting the Coliseum you must have a lot of Roman blood in your body, that I might not.

From Wikipedia: “The Colosseum today is now a major tourist attraction in Rome with thousands of tourists each year paying to view the interior arena, though entrance for EU citizens is partially subsidised, and under-18 and over-65 EU citizens’ entrances are free.”

Sachsenhausen is a panopticum and a very eficient estructure for the purpose it was created. The main door is also a vigilation tower from which all the corridors and barracks can be seen.

Also the Coliseum was an eficient device. A sophisticated structure managed the flow of the many elements that joint at the arena: Gladiators, animals, V.I.Ps, general public, cleaning services, props… Apparently at certain time allowed to show re-enactments of naval battles, with floodable areas where models of the ships can act.

In this shape you can say that the gladiators and the doomed enjoyed a perfect panopticum too, able to watch from one point (the arena) the whole 80.000 spectators. 

All this interest in architecture and death (architecture and cohercion) comes from a project I did recently (Buffer) in Matadero Madrid, that was the slaughterhouse of Madrid for many years and that now is a cultural institution.

Other day I will divert towards hospitals, that architecturally, technically and conceptually  share a lot of characteristics with these ones.

At breakfast with my colleages I had all opinions. For some is almost impossible not to see it. For others is very simple. Somes have to pass through it every day.

Some questions arised: Can I see it in pictures? What happens if accidentally I see it? etc.

If I see it accidentally everything will be over and my life will not have purpose anymore. I might leave the academy and retire from the world to Amsterdam.

I can see it in pictures. This is the map in the welcome pack I got at the academy.

I took a cab at the station. There was a football match and the traffic was quite bad. I asked the taxi driver not to pass near the Colisseum. He said that it was in a different part of the city. I was affraid that the traffic make him take a different route.

But as the taxi was getting closer of the hill in which the academy is located, I started seeing the roofs of the buildings and the myriad of illuminated monuments spread in the landscape. I was terrified. Not so much to see it accidentally, but more of not being able to turn my gaze otherwise. It was a moment of tension. I do not know if you can see it from the side of the hill, but until I know it is a safe area I cannot look down to the city.

I am going to take a picture of the panorama without looking through the viewfinder, and I will post it later.

Few hours later:

outbound picture

return picture

It has been confirmed: the view descending from the academy to the Trastevere is safe.

I came to Rome by train yesterday.

I got the Eurostar from London to Paris, I slept one night in Paris and next morning I got a train to Rome with a change in Milan. I wanted to feel the space in between, see the landscape and people changing progresively. In this times of ryanair I do not want to get there so quick that the minimum inconvenience flies me back to London.

      to    

In the train I was able to think a little further about my reasons for this project:

- It will help me to think about Rome. As for example in relationship with the tourists

- It will help me to think about my work, in terms of discipline and control

As always with ideas I feel the excitement just because I think it is a brilliant idea. Many times turns to not be brilliant at all few minutes later.

But I never know at first why I feel that the idea is interesting. It needs some time to get “reinforced”.

I guess that I just thought it was good because it will make me different and will pervert all my relationship with the people and the city. Very “arty”, isn’t it? Artists are extravagant, I heard.

Who has been in Rome for few months, even for a week and has not seen the Coliseum?
I came up with these people:

- Blind people
- Convicts in transfer from one prison to another
- People ill coming to the hospital
- Nero. I mean, everybody between the foundation of Rome and the construction of the building.

(now it comes to my mind this question: “who has been in New York and has not seen the Twin Towers?” Must have been triggered by the image of a future destruction of the Coliseum and the inspiration from Nero)

I know there are more reasons for me to do the project and I am keeping this blog to write about all the annoying nuances and implications of carry on with this task.

I was preparing my residency in the Real Academia de Espana en Roma. I have several works planned to do there, that will keep me in the studio pretty busy. 

Then I had this idea to interact differently with the city and the people around:

I am not going to see the Coliseum in the 8 months of my stay

First I checked if the Coliseum was near the station Roma Termini where I was arriving.

Then I wrote to the Academy to see if it was visible from the studio (that is not), as this would have been so distracting that I do not know if I would have able to carry on.

As it seemed possible I was very excited about it during the first days.

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