Parrhesia in Rome
2011
‘We must listen to the voices that seem useless. In brains full of long sewage pipes of schooled wall, tarmac and welfare papers the buzzing of insects must enter’
- Domenico in Nostalghia
After working on the project for three years, we decided that the final outcome for Gorchakov’s Wish would take the shape of a tri-partite video work and separate piece of writing, with the respective parts of both the video and written work responding to one of the final three scenes of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. For the video piece, specifically, we decided that we wanted to pair the footage of ‘Immolation Triptych II’, shot in-studio at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, with footage shot at the site of the ‘original’ filmic locations for Nostalghia. These sites include:
- Campidoglio (Rome, Italy)
- Santa Catarina Pool (Bagno Vignoni, Italy)
- San Galgano Ruin (San Galgano, Italy)
At this point in the project we already had footage shot on-location at the Santa Catarina Pool (see ‘Alba Lunedi‘). We also had footage shot on-location at San Galgano, which we had taken during one of our site visits to Italy. However, what we still needed was footage shot at the Campidoglio in Rome. This public space, famously designed by Michelangelo and said to be the instigating moment of Baroque urban planning, was used as a backdrop for the third-to-last scene in Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia: the scene where Domenico lights himself on fire after making a speech while he is sitting on top of the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the square.
So, we headed to Rome. We decided that, for the shot, we would do a bit of an ‘intervention’ into the public square by taking one line of Domenico’s speech and putting it on a sandwich board, then wearing the sandwich board while walking around the base of the statue of Marcus Aurelius. If you are interested, here is a full transcription of Domenico’s Speech; however, for our performance we decided to just edit out the line of this text – IL RONZIO DELLI INSETTI DEVONO ENTRARE — and put this on one side of the sandwich board. On the other side was our translation of the line using Google translate: THE BUZZING OF INSECTS MUST ENTER. We made the sign during the day and, at around 6pm, headed to the square.
After doing one circle around the square — and being informed by a very kind Italian man that the grammar of our Italian was totally incorrect — we were met by approximately 10 carabinieri (i.e. police) as well as some plain clothes officers. It would have been an excellent filming opportunity given that we were generating footage for the section Parrhesia; however, unfortunately, one of the officers shoved down the nose of our camera almost instantly. As it turns out, one cannot display text in any public square in Rome unless going through a rather rigorous procedure with the police — oops. (What was even more surprising was that we were also told to take off and ‘put into the rubbish’ the other sandwich board we had made that, referencing the mime in the scene with Domenico’s speech, was blank.) We left Campidoglio, repentant.
The following day we displayed our sign at the following public squares around Rome:
- Campo de Fiori
- Piazza Navona
- Piazza della Rotonda
- Piazza di Trevi
- Piazza Barberini
- Piazza del Popolo
- Piazza San Pietro
