Wasteland-scape: a Roman Ideal
Promenades dans Rome. Assembly Practices between Visions, Ruins and Reconstruction.
Istituto Svizzero, Rome, 2021
What we commonly call "terrain vague,” or “wasteland," consists of a neglected space, a place where there was, in a more or less distant past, a use which, for reasons that may escape us, is no longer. The terrain vague is an empty place: empty of meaning, culture, construction, determination. A place whose nature is ambiguous and where memory and nostalgia seem to hover, far from the present. They are places withdrawn from productivity, allowing vagrancy and strange encounters to take place. Regardless of their nature, size or precise location, they appear as a counter-image of the ideal city, dotting any urban territory with uncertainty.
Despite this condition, the terrain vague is a central figure within the idea of an urban landscape. The early representations of the "disabitato" of Rome in the 16th century captured this territorial terrain vague and contributed to the invention of landscape as an aesthetic form. As its name implies, the "disabitato," or the uninhabited, infers a place of abandonment, a place no longer deemed worthy of occupancy, a land wasted by conflicts, famine, illness and in some parts, repeated flooding. More particularly, the Foro Romano, which found itself on the very limit between the disabitato and the city, was the perfect location from which to reminisce on the lost ideal of antiquity as well as for inventing anew the ideal for any city and landscape to follow. Represented by numerous artists during their grand tour as a sort of prerequisite to demonstrate one’s know-how, and often standing on the Capitoline Hill looking towards the disabitato, the representations of the Foro Romano embody a key with which to read and understand our imagination of cities, landscapes and terrains vague. As such, one could argue that not only is it part of what could be identified as the primary landscape, it also constitutes the terrain vague’s archetype. A logical continuation of this statement would therefore be to see within the archetype, all primary forms of wasteland and that its representation should contain the basis for all possible variations of such condition.
Drawn by hand with a technical pen, the large-scale collage-drawing is an attempt to seek the archetype within the Foro Romano. Looking south from the Capitoline Hill, the entire site is flattened into a two-dimensional composition in which monuments, flora and fauna take on various scales, producing a view unreconcilable with the Foro’s current state as an archeological site and touristic destination. The collage-drawing engages a play on perception and suggests that a lateral movement of the viewer could reveal other possible points of view, unhoped for discoveries as well as hidden landscapes. In so doing, the collage-drawing, as the archetype, becomes the repertoire for composing and reconstructing the ideal figures of the wasteland-scape.
To visit Promenades dans Rome >
C. Lévesque. Foro Romano / La force des choses.
Encre sur papier, 120cm X 120cm, 2020
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dirty drawing
Drawing Imaginaries of a Wasteland-scape