Roman Foraging is an endless short film, a sequence of fragments collected spontaneously to explore the city of Rome and the Roman countryside (Campagna Roamana): from the Esquilino to the city gates - from inside to “Fuori le Mura” - from the Isola Sacra until you reach the Via Appia, the Caffarella, Tor Fiscale, the Parco degli Acquedotti.

During these last months, I have sought and met foragers along my paths, a sort of pilgrimage to the multiple roots of numerous antiquities: natural, architectural and human roots. I listened to people, their interwoven stories and anecdotes - that show us a new way of understanding and valuing time.

And while they taught me to recognize spontaneous plants and herbs, they immersed me in sounds far from traffic, within a solitary peace, a few steps from junctions, rings, glimpses of roads and city connections. Here, the foragers meet spontaneously, and create collective moments of presence and exchange. Humans and more-than-humans get along - artifice and nature converge, coincide, collide. They see each other, cross paths, embrace chance and adapt ferociously to the passage of time.

Roman Foraging is an immersive ethnobotanical journey in the city of Rome, which leads to the rediscovery of ancient oral knowledge, often at risk of being lost in the meanders of contemporaneity. Above all, Foraging Rome talks about knowing how to cultivate relationships, both intentional and unforeseen - those connections that indicate the desire to find and make time for ourselves.

Roman Foraging asks the audience to remain active, to walk towards the outside, towards its own outside - starting from some places that seem abandoned, but which in reality are often just forgotten. Traces of an unfinished past that can be transformed into a filter for possible futures.

The film attempts to gently look around these islands, in order to understand an ever-changing territory. Roman Foraging portrays new ways of being together, where conviviality becomes an exceptional tool for building new opportunities for inclusion within the city and its landscapes.

Foraging Rome invites you to feel the world, and this is just the first taste of it.

Bio

Sabrina Morreale is an architect, researcher, and educator. Her projects reinvent the relationships between landscape, urban fabric and human rituals, with a contextual yet trans-territorial approach.

Sabrina received her diploma from the Architectural Association in 2016. In 2020, she began researching "Of Public Interest" at KKH in Stockholm, investigating participatory practices and artivist strategies in public space. She also received the Lerici Foundation artistic grant for her work in Stockholm.

In 2021, Sabrina was featured in the Venice Biennale as one of 137 Italian female role models in architecture. She currently works as Studio Master in the Foundation Course at the Architectural Association in London.

Alongside Lorenzo Perri, Sabrina co-founded Lemonot, a design platform blending architecture and performative arts. Lemonot was one of nine architectural practices chosen for the Padiglione Italia at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. Since 2022, they lead the MA Architectural Design Studio ADS7 at the Royal College of Art in London, exploring conviviality as a gentle form of resistance and spatial activism.