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

It was not an oval pizza as expected, but it was okay. It contains a lot of parma ham, something I found interesting as a Spaniard. I wonder if the pizzaiolo got inspiration for 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 using a snail transportation system, as I did to get there. I got the ferry  from Civitaveccia to Barcelona. This brochure was a good welcome present by the crew of the ship.

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

As the Coliseum retreated  further and further away I could see more clearly what had  happened in the last days. 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,  is going to take more time to work out. A good epigraph for the project for me would be  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 for knowledge about the building and the city
Desire for knowledge about my self
Desire for new emotions
Desire to test new limits
Desire for new ways of experimenting the idea of death
Desire to reconsider my conceptions about art
Desire of desiring and
desire to control my desire.

This is my 8 months collection of Coliseum paraphernalia

This project has been the right tool to achieve what I proposed when I went to Rome: 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.

Gregor passed by Piazza Venezia yesterday and took this picture.

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

It gives me a slight “scorched earth” thrill, as if  just  as Rome has been erased from my mind , it has also physically disappeared.

It is as if  some functions of my body atrophied, after not being used for so long. Or even better: now the project is finished and I am still affected by it, I am like those people who have had a leg amputated and still feel it.

When I did If Alive, a FX make-up artist made me look like 65 by applying latex to my face. I got 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 not have looked  65, but perhaps something like 55 or so. Apparently the skin has little memory and it took some time for it to remember how  its shape was 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, I still felt in an emergency state when I was approaching an area that used to be dangerous, or I  unconsciously avoided looking in the direction of the Coliseum while on 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 will take for my mind to get back to its normal state, the state before these behaviourist techniques were used on me, if this ever happens, if the damage has not been permanent.

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 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 get to Quemado, a very small village far away from main roads. The instructions were to find a two-storey 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 in North by Northwest in which Cary Grant is at a crossroads in the dessert and looks each car approaching as the possible contact for his mission.

Many cars came, including one driven by two people in the same circumstances as us, looking forward to seeing the Fields. We gave them an interrogatory look. After a sufficiently  long time a four wheel drive vehicle came and a young lady ask us if we were there for the art work.
We got into her car and left ours there. She drove as for 30 minutes along smaller and smaller roads until we reached 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 bitten by a snake or having a power cut and being  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 dramatic when lightning hit one of the poles.

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

But then, how it could be any other way? After so much expectation, so much time and energy employed, everything was set to be ready for magic. I stayed up the whole night because I was wound up to do it. I gave a lot of credit to de Maria, whether it 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’s work, by my own enthusiasm. It was the investment in the work which made the work special.

The moral of the story in relation to the Colossal blog is clear. It was an important moment for me, and also for the people who attended, especially for the energy accumulated in 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 drew the curtains, a big storm was getting ready to break. I never saw so much lightning in my life. I think it is lightning credit I got during that visit to New Mexico, which reaped benefits in that day. Some of the lightning pointed at 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 my weariness. Some of them came back during the three following days, my three last 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 which make the experience of them  so similar to the artistic experience. He analyses how different these two experiences are, however,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 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 contributed 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 no later building in the area that can compete with it. Perhaps if San Giovanni Laterano or the Vatican where closed, this feeling were not be 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 contribute 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 with Him than with other buildings that seem to be in the same range (even if they are closer). This makes it look as if it belongs to a different picture.

- But apart from these matters of size what confuses me more is what, after couple of days of suffering it, I discovered and named as the “Two speed tourist syndrome (TSTS)”. I think this 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 it 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 feel settled here, who knows  the structure and the history of the city pretty well.
○ 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 go 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,as if  ”I cannot trust my eyes”.

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

It felt very much as if something was 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.

The main feature of this event was, certainly, the calibration of the change that it was going to effect in me, and the friends who attended, at the moment I opened my eyes, a moment that cannot not be rewound.

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

In Ringu the characters of the film are doomed when they 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 that 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 withing it. It is something that it is going to be broken and will never be fixed 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 consumption of experiences, after an already long artistic 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 who had 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 because of conceptual fuzziness than historiographical 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 they were seeing it for the first time.

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 reflects an intense art experience of the artist is for me the perfect art object.

Here are the people who stayed

The light was softly orange and started hitting the building from the left and invaded the whole old façade.
Once the process finished, around 7 am, we started a tour around the building, as I had done blindfolded a couple of times in the preceding days.
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 there was already a little queue. I was able to get my ticket for free.

I found the exterior more impressive than the interior. We walked all round the interior corridor but  the tiredness, the sun already hitting strongly and the geometrical increase of tourists made us cut our visit short. This ruin has a bit of the feel of a big dead animal and walking in the interior is rather  like staying in a mess of broken organs.

An all areas pass for the Paul McCarney concert.

The event of the day was finished and all that was left was to have the promised bathe.

The first hours were about comparing my mental image and the real one. There were several mismatches I will write about, but I need some more time to reflect on 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 softer sorrow; and never in his life, perhaps, will he be so moved and overcome by any sight not immediately connected with his own affections and afflictions”
DICKENS, C., Pictures from Italy, 1877

Some months ago I wrote the post  37- Operative Centres in which I remembered when I was troubled 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 requested a collaboration with  Fátima de Burnay a hat designer from Madrid, to see if we could 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, either physically or mentally.

Apart from 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, which 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.

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

I think there is something unimportant and ridiculous in this event but I know that the person  I am now and the person I am going to be in few minutes will be different people. 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 have come, all of you, have come 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 happens.

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

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

I got into the car and we passed next to the Coliseum on the way towards 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 background.

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

Right before opening my eyes

The very moment

Fascination.

It’s done. The day, though, went on 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.

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

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 which is kind of ridiculous and they use the system in the reverse way that it is intended to be used, 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  their narration much drier.

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, how 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 in Wikipedia 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 will probably then walk 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 all the 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 any 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.

1990 was the year of the premiere of Scorsese’s Goodfellas. In this movie there is a very similar shot, inspired perhaps by the one of Reagan. 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. Here is a frame 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 reintegrated  into society. It must be enormously sad to experience such a downgrade of your emotional life.

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

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

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  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.

The other day, while walking to the meeting with Fie, I decided to take a shortcut I’d never used before, because just 100 metres exposed to the Coliseum could save me 10 minutes walk. And while I was looking in 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 refreshing of this feeling, to get enthusiasm for the project.  I think is good to have it quite often.

I have the same approach as regards 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 opening my eyes in front of the monument. On other occasions I feel how special and friendly the event could be. Let’s see in a few days.

A friend tells me about her problems when she goes to her country where, because of political problems, she has to be protected every time she leaves her home. Bodyguards must to be arranged,  routes have to be checked before she starts the trip and somebody has to go before her to every shop or cafeteria, to see if everything is okay. She says that this sensation of being dependent on 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 portrays people in places they have a special relationship with.

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

The man and the building.

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

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

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 looking at many guides to Rome in Borders. However I have no recollection 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 that 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 be doing an artistic project about it. It is enough to be leading your daily life.

Ice Cream fridge

Lollipop

Sugar 1

Sugar 2

Sugar 3

Badge

Chocolate

Advertisement for Mozzarella

Advertisement for a pair of  glasses

Advertising poster for an exhibition

Advertisement for the city Christmas campaign

Advertisement for 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 ironmonger

It feels quite like a suicidal desire. Let’s say that the impulse is somewhat the same. (I remember many years ago that I associate that urgency with the desire to shave your head, as a substitute of chopping it off. There was no “shaved 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  20 % of  art projects accompanied by a text explaining the way it 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  crimes in a note.

I am not sure which of those would apply to 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 have finished and a new stable order exists, there are not enough resources to maintain as many retainers as there used to be. Many samurais without lords wander through the country in total poverty. It is so humiliating for them (their honor does 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 with the space and resources that the protocol requires. In the film, one lord  who agreed to help a samurai in this final act, feels compassion for him and hires 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, without the 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.

Also, this would look pretty much like the 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 appropriate picture to illustrate this post.

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

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 at full moon.

Edible “Moons of 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 a few days, at least the weather forecast.

Since I arrived in Rome I have been looking forward (notice the expression) to taking this picture.

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

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

At least temporarily you remove your capacity of seeing when attending the Unsight Restaurant. A friend writes to me about her experience of 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 you feel in the restaurant reminded me of 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”.

To compare it with these two that are almost contemporary with 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 in the top right corner, almost in the same place that the Coliseum occupies 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.

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

Recently there has been an special attraction for the visitors to the upper deck of the tower consisting of  5.000 electric bulbs organised in the shape of the Milky Way.

Also the Coliseum is very creative in terms of 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 into 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 to the three institutions in charge of 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 this light pollution it will be a bit easier to see the Milky Way.

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

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 actually 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 when you look at them you fill in the spaces between the stones, you are forced to supply the missing pieces. To experience something without seeing it also invites you to create features for the details not known. What I am now speculating about is how once I see  a building’s remains I would be able to speculate about how it was.

As I am clearly showing in this Colossal Blog project, the more annoyances a project provides,the more useful the experience turns out. 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 ready to offer.

So I am scouting for a new place from which to look for the first time at 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 at 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 the shot. These are my notes:

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,which 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 panes.

I thought of the possibility of breaking into the bank one night, staying there until dawn, looking at the building, and then leaving 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 in front, up on the hill, must have a wonderful view. It has two cafes downstairs.

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

Let’s see how it goes.

The fragility of art projects (even the very coherent ones) becomes evident when the project comes in contact with non-art environments and structures. I prefer not to approach people with interests 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 working with. The rest are an open door to future humiliations.

Through a slight 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 only found out about the mistake once I was in the taxi on my way to the meeting.

The facilitator of the encounter helped me arrive at the hotel and 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, because the Coliseum invades this room by every orifice. I sat and waited. When the manager came an awkward situation developed because I needed to walk backwards to shake his hand, as to turn to receive him would have involved getting 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-to 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 does not have any interests in the exchange. I recalled the image of European ambassadors in the courts of the Japanese Shoguns, trying to emphasise the importance of industralization and the advances already made in their countries.

My intention was to get there and have breakfast at the terrace with 30 people on the 1st of July, at 4.30 am, and wait with them until the daylight unveiled the building. I explained as best 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).A 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 at my back. Between the hotel and the Coliseum lie the remains of the Ludus Magnus, where the gladiators trained.

My refusal to deal with people who are not in the know is in tune (although on another theme) with this statement P. Ruiz P. made 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”.

Yesterday there was an “important” football match happening in Rome. The Olympic Stadium, in the northern part of the city, can hold  72.698 spectators and I guess yesterday it was full. This is roughly the amount of people who were able to attend 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, there were not as many Romans watching as in the times of the gladiatorial games. What was going to happen in the Olympic Stadium was felt in the whole city. Attendants were not so bloodthirsty, but just in case, beer was forbidden to be sold during a period of several hours.

“Bevanda magica” was not allowed, but profusely advertised throughout the city for a long time, curiously enough, in  Coliseum-themed billboards and installations.

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

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

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

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

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 and this came to my mind.

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

Unfortunately it 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 though it sounds 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.

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, this could be an example of both:

- either the whole world outside the stone is Alighero Boetti,

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

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

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

And also the 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 the Roman Empire and any of the countries looted and destroyed (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?

Two American tourists have sent back anonymously to Rome  some fragments of the Coliseum they took on a holiday trip 25 years ago. They have been suffering remorse all these years until they finally took the decision of repair 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 them 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 splendiferous 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, finally, make peace with Nature restored. No more remorse.

Kurt Vonnegut writes something similar in Slaughterhouse 5 when 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 in Nature.

But you know, Manuel, that this is hollow idealism, something impossible to achieve, if only because of the law of thermodynamics. As an artist would say, if we cannot get back to paradise, the only way out is to go as far as possible into disorder. I think I must steal some stones from the Parthenon in Athens and send them 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.

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 Tokyo to the Octopus from Akashi (2000) , documentary account of his experience of capturing an octopus in Akashi,  South of Japan, giving him a ride to Tokyo in shinkansen and bringing him back in the evening to Akashi again and releasing him alive. Along the way he shows him Mount Fuji, and Tsukiji, the Tokyo fish market. Never before had an octopus left the premises of Tsukiji alive.

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

Shimbuku and octopus.

Images of the Coliseum are spread all over the world. They belong to a “meta-nation” of icons. I wonder how many times in my life up until now I have seen  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 it would be an interesting idea to get pilgrims to take home some debris from the Coliseum, so in some years the building would have disappeared  into the world in homage to the martyrs who suffered there. The building would have been reduced to ground zero standards and the land would have been ready for the construction of a new church. I do not know why it 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.

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

The light is coming from the back of the Palatine Hill, which 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.

I couldn’t sleep though. After so many thoughts I’ve had these last months about the destruction of the Coliseum, the films depicting it, tales of its ruin and decay, the destruction of certain parts through pillage or earthquakes in the 14th century, this earthquake thrills me. It might just 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.

In Japan I have experienced 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’s headquarters in Ikebukuro, north of Tokyo. Japanese are well prepared operationally and psychologically for such an eventuality. I have this dreamy idea of London or Paris being hit by a powerful earthquake and, on account of the French or British citizens and emergency workers being completely confused, the rescue tasks having to be undertaken by Japanese tourists, extremely calm and organised.

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 a beautiful building that the 50,000 spectators of the Coliseum might watch it  indefinitely.

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

During the Roman Games the Coliseum worked as a frame, creating limits and distance for the violence,which remained in the arena isolated from the rest of the urban civilised life of Rome. It is very different from the other kinds of violence and death, those of the war and the accidents happening in the 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. As in action movies, the most explicit violence is separated 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)

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

- If I had circled clockwise as I did the other day, I would have had the wall on my left.
- The walk would have taken less time, because the Bath one is smaller and because the perimeter is encircled from the inside, reducing the distance.
- Although the angle of my walk would have been the same there would have been an issue concerning the concepts of “concave” and “convex” that I cannot quite define in my mind.

This inversion of the Coliseum can imply metaphorically that the whole world is just this small circle with only one tree (the Amazonian of the square) in the middle. Or it implies that the whole world beyond the walls of the square is a Coliseum, a violent spectacle. Like The Great Theatre 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 crosschecking the available information on the 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” comes “everybody is a pedestal” (”Jeder Mensch Ein Podest”.

The proximity of the tunnel to the building is surprising. However, the sensory experience of the Coliseum in the underground is non-existent.

Yesterday I got a quasi-complete sensory experience of the Coliseum (and I guess a few extra-sensory 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 shaded part, rugous, and impossible to hold in your arms. 2- It smells moist, like after rain. 3- The sound of the tourists shouting and the cars did not allow me to get much of sound of the building itself but something of the atmosphere surrounding it. I was naively expecting to be able to hear some harmonics of the remains of the vibrations the steps of elephants made in 80 AD. 4- It is definitively savoury, kind of salty.

I wonder how many people have licked the Coliseum since the building has been there. Apart from the arena itself, where I guess many gave it a try. Perhaps since the coming of jet culture there have been some Japanese visitors, who so much like 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 on my eye patches right there.

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

Ana (from the door of the station)

and Daniel.

The assignment was to make me circle as closely as possible around 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 attempts of measure 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 close 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 had my eyes open behind the patch. I did not realised until very late that perhaps closing my eyes would have help me to concentrate. I am not sure what made me more confident.

Even the performance aspect of the visit I felt was really  the approach of a sculptor.The actions were very much related to volume, size and material. I think ideas about what happened in the course of this visit will come to me in the next days.

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

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 produces energy from the fall of water is allowed to 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 they can 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, from 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” killings in relation to the games, not as glamorous as the ones in the arena, but more intimate. I learned 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 to start with but, as when a small amount of free heroin is given to kids, they quickly became addicts, making the slave investment worthwhile.

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 about it. How he acquired 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, then three seconds later has jumped to the States. The spectator 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 distances of a few metres. 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 jumps seamlessly 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 to have the Coliseum instead. He says it enthusiastically, but I think he has a hidden hint of complaint. Ah! unfaithful!

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

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

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

The site was saved for future filming.

This location of Jeans, by contrast, is not available anymore.

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

How they get there is one of the magical secrets of Bollywood genre: a song starts and they are suddenly 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.

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

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

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

And here is the bad guy.

They have also other locations in common as for example:

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

The object of the trip to the Coliseum a couple of days ago was to visit Rewind, a “museum” showing a 3d film reconstruction of the times in which the Coliseum was at ist best. The venue is 80 metres away from 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 attractions, simulating an archaeological site.The technology at this point consists just of flickering lights and terror-film-like sounds. But it seems that the weapons and utensils found in this mock excavation are taken from a real one. At the end of the passage is the film theatre. To watch the programme it is necessary 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 by Walt Disney aesthetics that it spoils all the fun for intellectual Coliseum avoiders. It must be this way though, because it is the only way of having enough visitors to pay the enormous cost of the installation and production of the film.

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

In the time of the Roman Empire, at the games, there were very effective tools to prove if  people lied. As for example, after a match in the arena, a gentleman used to go around touching all the bodies lying in the floor with a red hot iron to determine with 100% accurancy if they were dead, and not just pretending.

The walk started at San Giovanni underground station, with the intention of visiting a 3D virtual Coliseum existing at 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 in lively fashion 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 a few seconds after, we went round it on 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 disheartening feeling!

Two frames in a life can cause you to leave paradise and throw you wandering into 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 sit down, 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 in immediately because, actually, I did not know yet what had happened. I remember the examination for my motorcycle license many years ago, suddenly stalling the engine in the middle of the test. I alighted from the motorbike,more or less throwing in the towel, when the examiner said: “oh, it is just a stall. 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 it  will be the worst of 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 used 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 their resilience, their capability of taking errors on board. 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.

Only one fear. It could be a mad scientist thing: something goes wrong in the experiment and he is exposed briefly to radiation. Everything seems normal, but one’s hair can start falling out 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 burgled in London (it happened twice): an uncomfortable sensation of insecurity and loss. It passed in a 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.

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 since I am on that continent, I am including 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.

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

Brueghel’s is the first European painting dedicated to a building. Not only is it central in the scene, like 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 appears in mine as: the blog?, the electronic content?, the text?, my experience? the building itself? I am not sure what is the carrier in this work of mine.

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.

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

Actually I have neither the means nor the time to study the sources, to learn the necessary skills to interpret them, compare and contrast them, and therefore have my own personal take on them. I have to believe 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 talk about gladiatorial combats.

I am naturally sceptical and, inspired by the reading of Juan Benet’s La construcción 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 actual remains of the Tower of Babel. From now on and in the meanwhile, there is no doubt for me that future research will provide evidence for the accuracy of this hypothesis.

Virtual CGI recreation.

Its construction was 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 being caused by the diversification of languages came about because of the determination of Benedict I to give orders to the contractors in Latin, a language they resisted learning. The construction was in fact abandoned because of the lack of slaves, the 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 for the fact that Luther on 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.

The Way of the Gladiator by 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

Manni’x book (as the introduction points out, in a somewhat promotional manner, his name sounds like a gladiator’s)

- uses a literary license that allows him to put names of individuals to the different types of gladiators, their stories made up from a 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 makes the reader feel that the cruel and bloody events, though terrible, have nothing to do with our desires and death. This, in the opposite way to what you would expect, gives distance to the events.
- puts at the front the most shocking details, regardless of historical accuracy.
- has a lot of comparisons and terms belonging to the contemporary entertainment scene and business, to get people into situations they can recognise…
- has a heroic tone all through.

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

On the other hand, the Hopkins and Beard book puts in question every traditional received piece of information, confronts it with original sources and through facts uses a delicate craft to expand all the range of narrative techniques. It mixes rigorous historical research and experiences of the human condition, and creates speculations and some casual humorous comments. Just like Kagemusha.  I kind of think also on Andrei Tarkovski’s 1966 Andrey Rublyov or Bergman’s 1982 Fanny och Alexander

One of the ideas that repeatedly and strongly exercises Mannix is that the games were noble at the beginning, but the desire for blood and shocking spectacle from the audience make them become simply massacres. I think his book also has become a victim of the audience’s 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.

To read the tale 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 towards the torture singing, without struggling, accepting their fate with joy (for example in Quo Vadis, where this attitude very much 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 crashing straight into the enemy vessels. All Western literature during and after the war took good care to depict 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 on the diaries of some university student pilots,  about to perform suicide mission. There were not exactly keen on taking part in the attacks but rather antiwar. To fail to obey orders would have put themselves and their families in the worst social, economic and emotional situation. Like 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

One of the possibilities I am considering for the final project’s closing event is a kind of re-enactment of something that happened in the Coliseum. So many things have happened there! It is not defined yet, just a possibility to get hanging around my thoughts 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), finally nail him to a cross and leave him in the company of a Scottish bear. The historians point out the Promethean 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 at a far remove 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 (for 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 elipses or suggestions: it is important to see immediately and in reality what the audience wants to see.

“Snuff”. Why use this narrative? If in pornography the story is just a cover up, in the Coliseum it 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 reverse (perverse) version of Orpheus’s ability to charm the animals: the animals did not know the script and despite their role they used to tear apart the actor playing Orpheus.

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

Does the reality of the killing, the contact with the horror, make the experience more artistic? More intense perhaps? It reminds me of the joke in which a doctor is at a show looking at a yellowish face in a Fauvist portrait and when the gallery person asks “what do you think?” the doctor replies: “I would say it 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’m telling you as an agronomist.

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

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

The ceiling of the corridors feels like the sky, and during the day the light changes to 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 which run across are called “della Fontana”.

Japanese employees do small representations dressed as Roman soldiers or Italian traditional music bands. I wondered at that time if, in order to enhance the Italian experience of the visitors, it might be an idea to include some other Japanese employees disguised as Neapolitan street robbers and pickpockets, who could operate on shoppers. The wallets could be collected later in a desk at the exit or, for the sake of the real experience, lost 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 the idea of real and fake very confusing. It seems that every representation is a presentation, as the level of reality and accuracy doesn’t matter in terms of having a new event. Or in the other hand, however many elements of reality you put into it, it never leaves the realm of the representation.

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

This post does imply that I might have seen the Coliseum but that doesn’t matter, because conceptually it 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.

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 amphitheatre in Judea.

The winner.

Also the Jewish/British audience having fun.

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  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 compare the proportions with the original.

The way the orders, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, are stacked ws inspired by 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 passed 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 sighting I got in London.

As I was looking at the mobile I felt we entered in the area of its 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.

A few days ago I watched  Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film  Orphee. In this story Eurydice, Orpheu’s wife, dies but he is allowed to go with a guide to the Kingdom of the Dead 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 reassure him:

“Your wife’s picture is not your wife”

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

Where should  the limits to my Colossal Blog project be set?

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 photographs 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 ever to remember anything about it

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, for the sake of my artistic extravaganza. Now, after learning something about the history of the building, I feel like one more in a huge group of people, waiting in a state of high excitement, joy or fear, for the very moment in which to 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 piles of excrements might have been a frequent issue.

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 Mussolini’s 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 one is supposed to do. The Colossal blog is just an implementation in terms of 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. Living for many years in Madrid as an artist and never going to the Prado, at first by revelry, and then by habitual 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  during the day in provincial towns, and we used to meet in the same cafes.

I find it 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.

Huge resources were used in keeping the Coliseum well provided with 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 arrived.

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

He (she) is bound to die in the Coliseum.

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

This shot is in front of the Giardino Zoologico.

That looks like this in Google street nowadays.

He (she?) deserves some kind of punishment because he/she has destroyed part of the touristic assets of the city.

Well. These people do not look like perfect thoughtful archaeologist either.

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 this is the result of an inertia rather than urgency.

What if I NEVER see the Coliseum?

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

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

The last recorded gladiatorial fights 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 19th century perhaps, acts of revenge might have occurred after the fall of fascism, heart attacks for tourists 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 struck by the possibility of not being EVER able to upload it.

Please note that the accuracy of the map depends of variables of several types. I have identified 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 no special value can be torn down to make better views of the monumental area, as Mussolini did with the buildings in 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 referring to trees. Before and after the pruning, or the leaf-fall.

(It is behind those trees)

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

- Ad Hoc. These are not taken into 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 tour.

Finally, here I am at the Via Labicana.

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

Also in Lyotard’s The Differend we can read about the tension created in the Nazi scenario: only the Germans are suspected of being Jews, and the tension is maintained while it is necessary to probe it to keep a certain status. For the ones who have been already proclaimed Jews there is not tension anymore. Horrible future but no tension about their condition of doom. To prove that somebody was a Jew was much easier than proving Arian ancestry.

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.

From the point of view of the Church to deny the killing of the Christians in the arena is the same as holocaust denial, from a Jewish perspective. 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

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 might decide 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 Nero 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 the Coliseum, many years later, after Nero had died. So there is a historical inconsistency in Nero Burning Rome logo.

Also in the fact of Nero attending 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 Chistian-killing took place.

Quo Vadis  1951

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, threaten to force me to view 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 an even more miserable, jealous approach: “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 achieving some results here.

Oops, 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).

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 tube 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 does your heart pound when you know somebody you love is calling, if the ring of the handset is the same as 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, such 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 from 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 times of the Roman empire times.

Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) is a movie based in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicusis filmed both in classical and fascist era locations and mixing them very nicely. There is a special link between these two architectures. The Colosseo Quadrato plays a big role in 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

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

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

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 he 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.

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 studio 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 by 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 enormously arrogant that it would have been a very difficult task to maintain 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 circumnavigations decided by me in any aspect. God, power, church, money, pilgrimage… everything is pertaining to a very established existing reference point.

Years ago I had  a residency at Delphi in Greece. This town was the centre of the world for a 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 communicate with the gods.

At that time (1994) I was thinking about the importance of the centre, its dispersion, 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.

As the film goes on 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 Emanuele, 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 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 in profile when pointing.

This is a minor detail if you compare it with this scene of John Frankenheimer’s Year of the Gun. This is a pre-Basic Instinct Sharon Stone 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 have the policemen got here, much closer to the Coliseum than before? Also it 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 at its best in his film even if spoiling the continuity.

The Belly of an Architect 1987
Year of the Gun 1991

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 reduced to its souvenir and fetishist functions:

A sign model of Verona’s arena.

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

Spartacus (1960)

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 decided to attend the play. I can imagine that sometimes Roman Emperors liked 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 of the highest.

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, advertised 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, they 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 unforeseen 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 more Swiss than the Coliseum (notice the snow).

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

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

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

Then at the hotel

The next day it was snowing. The building feels small, compared with my mental picture of the Roman one. It is well built and perfectly round shape. There is also remains of larger previous glories.

Daniel, my travel mate, suggested that considering how neat and perfectly rebuilt the arena is, the mayor should remove this annoying piece of ruin. Instead of that, I think they are planning to make it look like 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 rows 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 swept 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. The 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, which reminds me of the one in Nuremberg.

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

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

Or even better. Considering

- the make up (the rows 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 dissatisfaction when I left the building,

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

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

To delay the moment of visiting the Coliseum 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 normal people, o being vulnerable to, for example, a taxi driver, of being impaired or demanding 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 no 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, the same stimulation repeated, there is not place for fulfilment: there is always a new target to cover, however minor, 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 fulfilment, 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.

Future

Retrofuture

La Decima Vittima (1965)

It is the same handwriting as the previous one. This one is stamped in Venice. I got a graphologist, dna analysis, fingerprints expert, and all the information checked against the list of producers and sellers of this type of postcard. The circle is getting smaller.

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

We began 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 dragged 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. Beautiful 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 turning to the East we descended the monte Tarpeo until via della Consolazione. There somebody who wanted to help has put up a sign to tell me that I cannot continue to the Foro Romano.

A 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:

Fortunately my guide was alert and my virginity was saved.

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

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, because 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 from Paris in which although I do not know what is around the corner, I know there is not a coliseum threat. A classification of expectations.

Yesterday I went out for a walk and it was raining for a while at an intensity very much playing with the limit at which opening 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 here also the people quickly open the umbrellas as soon as the first drops come, if for no better reason than 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 tell in L’illusion de la fin: There is a man walking under the rain with a closed umbrella under the arm. When somebody asks him why he doesn’t open it he replies: ” I do not like to feel at the limit of my possibilities”.

I reserve the Coliseum because I do not want Rome to live at the limit of its possibilities. Perhaps I am afraid of Rome not being at some point of my stay good, entertaining, exciting, spectacular, beautiful or scary 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 any other alternative that downfall and decay” (sorry, translated to Spanish by somebody else and then to English now).

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 it has no importance at all) you can relate everything to it. Either because is similar or because is dissimilar. As all  cylinder like objects can be related to the Coliseum by similarity, all the ones that are not can be also related by their lack of cylinderness. All themes that usually are wandering around my head can be inserted in a coliseum pod bay. If it doesn’t work in the straight 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 like a birthday party in the future, one more among many others, everything can be related to it. Actually the main purpose was to have some certainties in 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 passengers. It was an English attraction 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, and not the train itself:

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

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 similar history to the Coliseum but only held 30,000 people (instead of 80,000) and was pink (due to the limestone of Valpolicella). Like the Coliseum it suffered  an eathquake and a lot of stone was stripped away when it was 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

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

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

These are also known as Spanish stairs.

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

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

Martha (1974)

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 and 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 down before, turning around the monument of Vittorio Emanuele. I got in a panic and I started closing and opening my eyes, turning my head in a kind of hysteria. Then, at one awful moment I opened the eyes to see this:

what the f is this?

I couldn’t believe it. It should be very far away. It is like in Asteroids or Defender when, in danger of being 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 stressful moment. The tide of emotion which overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it was scarcely to be distinguished from religious doom.

This morning I went there again just to verify that it is the Teatro Marcello.

This is the same street in the opposite direction.

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

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

It was interesting to experience how different the city feels when you get lost and can walk for 20 minutes along streets you do not know with the certainty 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 Pompidou cafe (very comfortable) I read a message from my friend warning me: from the top of the tower, on a very clear day, you might catch sight of the Coliseum if you looked in the direction of Rome. I laughed. Thanks.

There is another clear disturbance of my daily life when compared to London: I used to see at least one branch of Starbucks every day and I have not see any since I arrived here. However there is no temptation or possibility of doing it.

I read Internet forums in which Starbucks lovers complain about the lack of stores in Rome. They wonder why the company has not made inroads here, speculating 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 MacDonalds cannot afford any premises here except 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

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 misrecognized it due to the excitement and responsability.
Or that the Coliseum had the same confusion- inducing power as  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, being 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

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 basilica 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 a few days ago about a 30 tons Richard Serra sculpture that disapeared 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?

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 from an unknown sender.

At first I thought was very nice detail of somebody, but during the day I started to wonder if I should call the Forensic Police. Like in Robert Altman’s The Player It is becoming kind of threatening. If an anonymously delivered dead fish for the 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

It has two huge beautiful windows.

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

The other is looking east: 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 connection is the ability of both buildings to organise the city in your mind around them.  Like the contextual menu in Google maps  it says: “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 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 going out visiting people or places, not taking public transport at all… It would have been a very efficient 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 to, everything is capricious.The excitement is to put limits and then test it. As in one of Blake’s programmatic 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 route from the Academy to there  would probably pass directly by the Coliseum. Therefore I operated 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 that this urgency I was experiencing is as alien to Rome as the Stendhal syndrome would be to Birmingham.

To walk a couple of hours in the night, with some glasses of wine in my body, in a city I do not know, with the “restrictions” I have (that make taxis and night buses complicated) was not very appealing so, regardless the animation of the conversation, I started making moves to leave. As everyone knows in Italy it takes  a 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 from the charm of Italian night life because I did not need to take public transport nor to walk because 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 the city well, came with us and took on the leadership role. 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.This is the area I explored a 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 of the window (if only that had been allowed for back seat passengers by the design of the car). It was only few moments of stress and then the danger passed.

Once you go to a party, have drinks, sit 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  some dinner party that he though little of at the time.

Magnetic power lines around Clavius Coliseum

2001: A Space Oddysey (1968)

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. 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 pushes you to the main streets that give a direct view of it.

It is behind this hospital but both side streets run 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 it could be possible to get to the gardens behind and then to the group of blocks we were aiming for. But at that moment I thought it was not fair just to close my eyes without thinking for a while about other possibilities. Perhaps on a future visit.

I dreamt of being 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).

DIN 1451 Engschrift™ Package Font

(Deutsches Institut für Normung)

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 at it on the 30th of July.

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

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

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

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

Like Sierra’s, the fact that it is just an almost random decision (not so random in the end) makes it more appealing.

Prohibition enhances desire. The key word for this project is “perversion”, a kind of fetishism that looks for “everything around the thing but the thing itself”. The restriction makes me desire to see the Coliseum more than I ever expected I was going to.

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

View Map

I will update the map with the areas that I have visited. At certain moments 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”.

I got a similar impression when I visited the concentration camp Sachsenhausen near Berlin a couple of months ago.

I felt awkward seeing visitors adopting the same attitude you can see in the Grand Canyon or (let’s say) Eurodisney. In the tourism phenomenon 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 recognise Slavic faces.

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

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 efficient structure for the purpose it was created.  The main door is also a watch tower from which all the corridors and barracks can be seen.

Also the Coliseum was an efficient device. A sophisticated structure managed the flow of the many elements that joined in the arena: Gladiators, animals, V.I.Ps, general public, cleaning services, props… Apparently there were re-enactments of naval battles, with floodable areas where models of the ships could float.

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) all the 80,000 spectators.

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

Another day I will deviate towards hospitals; architecturally, technically and conceptually  they share a lot of characteristics with the previous examples.

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

If I see it accidentally everything will be over and my life will have no 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.

But as the taxi was getting closer to the hill in which the academy is located, I started seeing the roofs of the buildings and the myriad illuminated monuments spread in the landscape. I was terrified. Not so much of seeing it accidentally, but more of not being able to turn my gaze elsewhere. 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 on the city.

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

A few hours later:

outbound picture

return picture

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

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 progressively. In these times of ryanair I do not want to get there so quickly 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

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 this question comes to my mind: “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 carrying on with this task.

Then I had this idea of interacting 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 (it is not), as this would have been so distracting that I do not know if I would have been able to carry on.

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

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