The
ladder built by Enzo Umbaca is a bid to climb up to the top
of the Capitol and then down again. As he explains, “This
way of moving straight ahead, overcoming all obstacles, and
dominating from above is a concept of the ancient Romans.”
The Capitol is indeed emblematic of the Roman idea of city
planning. It is located in the heart of the castrum at the
junction of the major cardo and decumanus, axes that generate
a grid plan destined to grow through reiteration. And yet,
while it is true that Rome did not apply the layout it exported
to its colonies internally, the subsequent development of
Ostia blatantly rejects the grid in favor of the previous
system of irregular, winding roads. While the monumental items
of the imperial era follow one another in a continuum along
the decumanus, the houses and shops thus take other paths.
Given the impossibility of deducing the structure of the city
as a whole from the castrum, Umbaca offers visitors the chance
to observe it directly from above, including the synagogue,
thus enabling them to “think freely through the fragmentation
of remains/ruins, to imagine and reconstruct the history of
the place and, at the same time, to see possible forms that
could appear/emerge”. He himself admits to having been
struck by the fragmentary nature of the remains, the segmentation
of the lines of the brick walls covered with a coating of
cement “as though it has been snowing”. As Umbaca
points out, this segmentation forms a sort of abstract anamorphosis
that I feel no need to act upon: “Memory essentially
has no need of concrete intervention, just the highlighting
of what already exists. The cement coating has already altered
the original, memory has already undergone intervention, I
do nothing more than make it visible.” |
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