Morte a Roma

Fabrizio cotognini
an American Academy project:
I think of an open book and ubiquitous, to browse and dial in the twilight; un livre de chevet, literally from the bedside, an artist's book, sculptural support for pages that accompany every night in a long time "honest and capable," including sleep, wakefulness and the entry into the memory.
I think of a book in a space whose perimeter is the borderland between painting, sculpture and writing. A book of every place that departs and arrives in Rome, a memento mori of architecture and monuments, a notebook travel in the territories of the visual culture of our time, who can combine the archaic and the present.
I think of a book to meditate, including color forms, signs, words, which also contains dynamic white pages, to share with those, archaeologist ?, architect ?, flanuer time ?, wants to integrate the suggestive paths.
I think of a book that could start a cycle of many places, but that would depart from the city-world, Rome is the perfect place for an endless game of quotations, to carry out an excavation in sediments that death has placed on itself for centuries. In Rome where they grow small plants in mitreo it buried ten meters below the basilica of San Clemente; in Rome door alchemical Marquis Palombara not leading anywhere anymore but among the rubbish, can only be crossed by those who "knows burn with water and wash with fire"; in Rome, where the cement neo-Gothic church of the Sacred Heart preserves objects marked by the fiery hands of the souls in Purgatory, in the Rome of "Rome or death", in Rome de mortacci them yours, the Rome of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and Athanasius Kircher who he took very seriously; in Rome, where you add up the coliseums.
I think of a book on this, and more, a book in which, among memories, exploration, quotes, machinations, cinetismi, Anamorphosis, geometric projections, through the chaos of the things recognize their affinity, and creativity to reinvent another story of 'art.
The American Academy is a place of encounter and exchange that can be a fertile platform to give body to my project and I hope an opportunity for enrichment for all those who are professionally involved and contribute in the stages of research and implementation.