Rome is a palimpsest of ideas accumulated through millennia of victories, defeats, and the passage of countless lives played out within the city\u2019s walls. Since April 2016, this coexistence of past and present has been physically manifest in Rome\u2019s public space. William Kentridge\u2019s five hundred-metre frieze recreates iconic and iconoclastic images of the city\u2019s past by selectively erasing the patina from the travertine banks of the Tiber River. Inhabiting the intersections of familiar\/unfamiliar, tangible\/intangible, and authored\/collective knowledge, Triumphs and Laments: A Project for Rome<\/em> invites us to question our ideas of the city.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Kentridge positions the archive of Rome\u2019s history not as a source of knowledge, but as an impetus to its discovery. Through his procession of silhouettes the artist has subtly disrupted iconic figures. Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg embrace in a diminutive bath-cum-shower instead of frolicking in the Trevi Fountain, while a murdered Aldo Moro slumps alongside an ecstatic Saint Teresa. Kentridge has elsewhere explored twentieth-century Italy, and cites La Dolce Vita<\/em> as an influential vision of Italy. His reconfig\u00adured images appear to be claiming artistic authority. Yet these public works reside between the familiar and the alien, and are presented without the institutional trappings of wall text to inform their meaning. They are emphatically open to interpretation. Kentridge\u2019s invitation to find \u201ca sense of history from fragments\u201d places knowledge within the hands of his transient, anonymous viewers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fragmentation is central to the new historical understanding prompted by Triumphs and Laments<\/em>. His Judaea triumph from the Arch of Titus is painfully ruptured. Ragged and dismembered soldiers struggle to uphold broken placards of Roman victory. This is not Kentridge\u2019s reimagining of the scene. His \u2018triumph\u2019 faithfully reproduces the current state of the nearly two thousand-year-old relief. In the Forum Romanum these figures are softened by the sympathetic condition of the surrounding architecture, and the weight of history and monumentality gives dignity to their broken forms. But exposed against the newly-cleaned banks of the Tiber River, the figures\u2019 fragmentation is unavoidably raw. Kentridge\u2019s archive suggests that a more poignant history is latent in the image. Triumphs and Laments<\/em> celebrates Kentridge\u2019s exploration of \u201ctriumph in the lament and the lament in the triumph\u2026\u201d in both history and the documents that record its passing. Elsewhere in the frieze, the words \u201cquello che non ricord<\/em>\u201d (\u201cthat which I do not remember\u201d) are inscribed in a black square. By not shying away from the intrinsic fragility of his sources, Kentridge confronts the anxiety of knowledge-loss as a contributor to the city\u2019s past in its present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite being etched in stone, Kentridge\u2019s procession is in a state of constant flux. As his figures are reclaimed by the stone banks\u2019 patina, the physical traces of this new chapter in the city\u2019s history will be lost. But its knowledge will be perpetuated in the communal space of collective memory. The tangible figures of Triumphs and Laments<\/em> will have left their imprint upon Rome\u2019s intangible knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n