DAMOCLES OF IMAGINARY MYTHS (NOSTALGIA, POWER, CLASS), analogue exposures, 2024 – ongoing, Napoli, Roma, Poppi, Saturnia, Agerola, Bagnoregio. Remains of the world as it supposedly was, in ways made to be observed and known. Through the medium of photography which hovers between what is imaged and not real, and that which is there and real, are depicted headless sculptures, landscapes and portraits of places subjected to meteorological forces of time and space. Maintenance of the Roman Empire serves a political action through preservation of codified values. These film exposures of beauty and decay invite inquiry into the paradoxes of romantic idealism, mastery of craft, and the dangers of hierarchical orders on a pedestal. Contact with inquiries to discuss this new work in progress: mariammanart@icloud.com
Letters to a Young Poet….Rome 29 Ottobre 1903…My dear Sir, your letter of 29 august reached me in Florence and only now – two months on – do I give you news of it. Forgive me this delay, but I prefer not to write letters when I’m traveling because letter-writing requires more of me than just the basic wherewithal: some quiet and time on my own and moment when I feel relatively at home. We arrive in Rome about six weeks ago, at a time when it was still the empty, hot city, the Rome supposedly ridden with fevers, and this circumstance together with other practical difficulties to do with settling in, meant that the unrest surrounding us went on and on and the foreignness of the place lay on us with the weight of homelessness. On top of that you have to remember that Rome (if one is not yet acquainted with it) seems oppressively sad when on first arrives: the lifeless and drear museum-atmosphere it breathes, the abundance of fragments of the past (on which a tiny present nourishes itself) that have been fetched out of the ground and laboriously maintained, the unspeakable excess of esteem, nourished by academics and philologists with the help of run-of-the-mill tourists, given to all these disfigured and spoilt objects which after all are basically nothing more than accidental vestiges of another age and of a life that is not our own and is not meant to be. At last, after weeks of daily fending off, you get your bearings back, and somewhat dazed you tell yourself: No, there is not more beauty here than elswhere, and all these objects which generation after generation have continued to admire, which in expert hands have mended and restored, they mean nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value; but there is a great deal of beauty here, because there is beauty everywhere. Infinitely lively waters go over the old aqueducts into the city and on the many square dance over bowls of white stone and fill broad capricious basins and murmur all day and raise their murmur into the night, which is vast and starry and soft with winds. And there are gardens here, unforgettable avenues and flights of steps, steps conceived by Michelangelo, steps built to resemble cascades of flowing water – giving birth to step after broad step like wave after wave as they descend the incline. With the help of such impressions you regain your composure, win your way back out of the demands of the talking and chattering multitude (how voluble it is!), and you slowly learn to recognize the very few things in which something everlasting can be felt, something you can love, something solitary in which you can take part in silence. I’m still living in the city, on the Capitol, not far from the finest equestrian statue that has come down to us from Roman art – that of Marcus Aurelius. But in a few weeks I shall be moving into a quiet, simple room, an old summer-house lost in the depths of a great park, hidden away from the city with its noise and its inconsequentiality. I’ll live there for the whole winter and take pleasure in the great stillness from which I expect the gift of good and productive hours…From there, where I shall feel more at home, I’ll write you a longer letter in which I’ll also have something to say about your writing. Today I must just mention (and it was perhaps wrong of me not to have done so before) that the book you announced in your letter (which you said contained piece by you) has not arrived here. Has it been sent back to you, perhaps from Worpswede? (For: packets cannot be forwarded abroad.) This is the best explanation, which it would be nice to have confirmed. I hope it has not gone astray, which given the Italian postal service cannot be ruled out – alas. I should have been glad to receive the book (as with everything that gives some sign of you); and any verse you have written since I shall always (if you entrust me with it) read reread and take in as well and as completely as I can. With good wishes and greetings, Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke.
