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RE-COLLECTING ROME: A Diachronic Guide to the City Nichole
Wiedemann University
of Texas at Austin The project, Re-Collecting Rome: A Diachronic Guide to
the City, explores the urban fabric of Rome using the section, the representational tool used to expose a structure as
if it were cut/drawn through by an intersecting plane.† While the plan
has been the prevalent means of documenting Rome and all other cities,
it remains a singular moment in history- in fact, one may suggest it
can never escape the present. The section, on the other hand, is a diachronic
cut that spans time and space exposing a network of associative linkages,
which can read forward and backward, up, down, and
across. The work, in drawings, models and text, discloses a mnemonic
context, which crosses and links the distinct histories of Rome. This
investigation of the two Romes, pagan and Christian, references the
archeological-architectural methods employed by Giovanni Battista Piranesi
in his Il Campo Marzio of
1762. In Piranesi's reconstruction of the field of Mars, he identified
and mapped, through combined text and drawing, urban elements in six
historical periods based on images, artifacts and texts of the past.
Each plate, interweaving image and text is a network of precise urban
references fixing an inventive landscape of juxtaposed times and places.
The drawings and models, like that of Piranesi's, are not illustrative
of a known condition but rather an active exploration, an analytic projection
grounded by certain trues. As the
pagan Rome expands and the Christian Rome converges, the project follows
the trajectories (historical, political, religious, mythical) of the
routes traveled. These overlaps are inextricably fixed within the land
and cityscape. The spatial and temporal intersections structure the
emphasis of writings and drawings as well as provide referential markers
to guide the reader's paths through the body of the work from beginning
to end. Texts, artifacts and images are recollected, recombined within
the present to reconstruct events of myth and history. The drawings
and models cut across the Roman topography, creating new journeys, simultaneously
spatial and temporal. The project
supports the collaboration between drawing and text, theory and practice,
using the section as an intersecting
plane linking the history of events and the history of places. Through
parallel investigations -an interwoven analysis of visual image and
text- the convergences, physical and metaphysical, between the pagan
and Christian nations are exposed. |