Shadow of a Monument

In Shadow of a Monument, I created a square Colosseum (a nickname used to describe Mussolini’s: Palazzo della Civilta’ Italiana) using a punctured brick: the same material and module that often constitutes its structure becomes here form and representation, in a game of architectural self-reference. In front of the Colosseum, I went on to shoot stop-motion: I had a model military truck from the Fascist era cross the road: a scene charged with historical tension. For those who did not live through those years and have only heard about them from their parents or grandparents, all this seems unreal, almost dreamlike. Yet Italian culture—in the present and the future—will always have to reckon with that past.
This composition evokes the ambiguous character of those years: a rhetorical, alienated modernity that we can now only view through the distorting mirror of time, between real, ethereal, and surreal.