On April 28 and 29, 2011, a public of over 100 saw the cortile of the McKim, Mead & White Building at the American Academy in Rome transformed by a collaborative installation entitled X LOCUS.

X LOCUS featured environmental media by Founders Rome Prize Fellows in Architecture Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, sound by Elliott Carter Rome Prize Fellow in Musical Composition Paul Rudy, and lyrics by Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies Jennifer Scappettone. The installation, a creation of four 2010–11 AAR Fellows, was on display in the cortile of the McKim, Mead & White Building over the course of two evenings, April 28–29, 2011.

A conversation-poem on national, cultural, linguistic and psychological dislocation created by Jennifer Scappettone—installed in the gravelly space inside a moat of liquid loggia projections and sculpted ambient fountain/fowl for X Locus, a collaboration between Scappettone, Paul Rudy, and Stephen Mueller and Ersela Kripa (AGENCY Architecture), held at the courtyard of the American Academy in Rome on April 27–28, 2011.

The sound poem is constructed of interweaving movements approaching the history and actuality of this courtyard, shaped by Columbian Exposition architects McKim, Mead & White in 1913, lined with playfully pastiched funerary inscriptions within an Academy of national designation on the Janiculum Hill, just inside the Aurelian Walls of historical Rome, traversed below by Trajan’s Aqueduct.

In this hybrid neighborhood contoured by the Wall and a sequence of raucous gates, the designations “American” and “Italian” are both housed and continually recast as a looping sequence of never quite arrived-at aspirations, disappointments, researches and desires.

Thanks to the voices of the AAR community—chefs, scholars, architects, composers, poets, baristas, a singer, a sculptor, a painter and installation artist, a filmmaker, a doctor, and various others eluding definition—for the sought and found material of their cherished voices.