Kristi Cheramie

Kristi Cheramie

Prince Charitable Trusts/Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize
September 12, 2016–July 28, 2017
Profession
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Knowlton School, Ohio State University
Project title
Recovering Lost Worlds: A Natural History of Erasure
Project description

If the city is a network of protocols and operations continuously generating politics, material, and data, it is also a landfill of forgotten spaces and unwanted histories. These ill-fitting gaps and glitches are kept alive by popular memory and paper trails, generating a mythic topology of alternate histories and counterfactual possibilities for the future city. My work visualizes the unfulfilled geographies of these lost worlds, acting as a proxy for their erased or not-yet-realized trajectories. I propose to exhume buried worlds from three sites in Rome: the Cloaca Maxima, the Colosseum, and the Tiber revetment walls. I will revisit and recover the more sparsely documented phases of their urban histories, using design to surface speculative scenarios where archival evidence ends or splits. Positioned at the slippage between documented truths, unfinished business and mythic tales, I will use hybrid representation to dissolve markers of past and present, fact and fiction, exposing our quixotic desire for permanence in the face of change.