On Thursday, April 28, 2011, a public gathering of over one hundred people saw the cortile of the McKim, Mead & White Building at the American Academy in Rome transformed by a collaborative installation entitled X LOCUS. The installation, the creation of four current AAR Fellows, will also be on display from 8:00 to 10:00 PM on Friday, April 29.
X LOCUS features 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.
X LOCUS: Cortile Poem (SoundCloud audio file)
X LOCUS, Thursday 28 April 2011. Photo: current Fellow Adrian Van Allen
X LOCUS explores senses of dislocation and repatriation in the communities of the Academy, Rome, and the respective backgrounds of those who pass through here via traversals of sound, text, and visual projections onto the introverted cortile space.
X LOCUS, Thursday 28 April 2011 (photograph by Adrian Van Allen)
X LOCUS, Thursday 28 April 2011 (photograph by Adrian Van Allen)
The installation raises issues of placelessness and loss which cannot be represented as visual images. The organizers wrote, “Through a subversive use of the two-dimensional image in these shared spaces, we mean to generate experiences of reorientation.”
Gathering at the sonic center of X LOCUS, Thursday 28 April 2011 (photograph by Corey Brennan)
X LOCUS collaborators clockwise, from upper left: Jennifer Scappettone, Ersela Kripa, Paul Rudy, and Stephen Mueller (all photographs by Star Black)