Discoveries

I’ve been back for about six weeks! This reentry time has been so important for simmering on experiences and making discoveries about the trip. This post shares a handful of those discoveries, small revelations, and personal stories.

Intuition is Queen

Shortly after arriving in Rome, it was apparent that my prospects of seeing and doing everything needed to be reigned in. It quickly began to feel wrong to include any form of car, bus, or train travel within the project. These transportation means create vastly different experiences and would have allowed me to travel to places that would not have been reasonably walkable within a day's time. Additionally, this project is deeply about public space, so sites that required a ticketed entry, or that had restricted access, were excluded. This shrinking of the study area allowed me to spend multiple visits at the same locations, get to know my neighborhood, and traverse enough routes to develop hot spots, favorites, main drags, and familiarity. While I attempted to reign in my scope through various means prior to the trip, it’s impossible to truly know what my capabilities will be and what will feel right before arriving. Intuition drove a lot of decisions and required calibration of my strides, energy levels, daily rhythms, and inspiration.

(above) The GPS was tracking every step, every day and the results are a network of squiggles that start to depict everyday routes, favorite spots, and city forms.

Drawing Takes a Long Time and a Lot of Brain Space 

I had dreams of traversing and drawing a vast length of the Tiber River. At one point I wanted to walk from Piazza del Popolo to the OCEAN. This was highly aspirational, as it turns out, drawing and walking use a ton of energy and brain space. Drawing requires level of care and a heightened awareness that I had not practiced in everyday life and while totally fun, the mental drain it caused was one of the most surprising realizations of the trip. I found I maxed out at about three hours of drawing per day. It was very important that the drawing remained fun and didn’t feel like a job. The Tiber River drawings ended up covering about three miles in length, the stretch within the Aurelian Walls, and took about seven days to traverse and draw. Some days I only captured short lengths, as there were many interesting things that needed to be drawn along the way, and this took time.

(above) The Tiber River drawings were captured on long accordion paper. They are still a work in progress and I’m curious how additional information can be overlaid to bring more context to the sketches and connect them.

Peace can be found in Many Places and the Project Wanted to Be About Those Places 

The planning leading up to the trip defined areas of study within a set of parameters, spaces that are physically separated from the urban fabric, spaces that have an inherently different character due to their material and context, and spaces whose meaning changes through time. These considerations are ways to project the notion of heterotopia as an analytical paradigm, spaces within which, as Foucault theorizes, society is reflected. This led to a handful of space types in Rome: the void between the Tiber River walls, parks, alleyways, vacant areas, piazzas, cemeteries, wild corners, and other dynamic public spaces. While these turned out to be lovely study areas with complex and interesting histories, they also, sometimes, were the places where I found the most peace. Rome is famously chaotic, but I think I was also seeking peace due to other aspects of life back home, as a caregiver for my elderly father, three years of pandemic times, and many new changes ahead. There’s something though, to consider about why this mysterious space between the Tiber River walls, had its own sort of comfort to it. Maybe it was because very few tourists dared venture into its depths? Maybe because landscape architecture has taught me to find beauty in the wildness that is created. Either way, I wanted to hang out among its weird wildness.

(above) Images from the Tiber River corridor.

(above) A very old plane tree at Villa Borghese.

There is a Richness in Perceiving Time and a Treasure in Forgetting About It 

One wonderful opportunity this project affords was the chance to relinquish my everyday routine and adopt a daily rhythm that was slower and sleepier. Continuing the mantra of “this is not a job and should be fun,” my days were loosely scheduled. By prioritizing drawing on days that I felt most inspired, there was rarely the occasion where drawing or walking or perceiving felt forced (unless I had been drawing for many hours). It kept my mind open and fresh, and this is so important because it means I could fully experience. Restfulness (ban alarm clocks!) allowed my body to absorb the energy of the walks. Isn’t there something just transcendent about imaging the energy of the place kinetically transferring into your muscles and joints via a walk? Forgetting time and resting allowed for this energy to settle in, and subsequently contribute to immersion, presence, and peace.

The Entropy that Follows Forgotten Things Leaves Beautiful Traces

Along with the very linear Tiber River walks, there was a second experiment that aimed to capture spaces organized less by the line that walking creates and more by the way a walk is remembered. Memories are not necessarily linear, chronological, or within the realm of logic, but are typically oriented around experiences that are evocative. For me, this meant capturing vignettes not on a linear accordion paper, but in a wonderful tiny sketchbook, the pages of which can be separated and organized in countless interesting ways. These drawings simply render curious phenomena that I found whimsical or gave me pause. Of the many places that these types of walks traversed, Villa Doria Pamphilij was my favorite. Like many of Rome’s open spaces, it was once a private estate, but now functions largely as a public park with a huge range of space types: amazing pseudo classical ruins, a grotto, an incredible stand of Stone Pines, a duck pond with a man-made island in the middle, a decrepit water feature filled with turtles, an aqueduct, pristine formal gardens, and a shockingly intricate chapel. We stumbled across this park when my partner Vincent was accompanying me, and it was one of those magical moments where we felt like we had found hidden treasure, and the weather was warm and the light was perfect (cheesy, I know!). There is an amazing sense of decay in both the site and a history of aristocracy. Now, pick up cricket games are played in the old polo field and regular Romans walk their adorable dogs through the old hunting grounds. I visited this place many times throughout my trip and the dreaminess of that first visit certainly contributed to my romanticizing this place.

(above) People enjoying the spaces below the stone pines.

Over the summer, I will be working towards a public exhibition. My next blog post will share how the work is progressing and how the drawings contribute to and organize the larger story of this project.