Unbroken Thread[s]

What if no one remembers?...

e se nessuno si ricorda?...

Underneath unearthed...

Order slips into order of a different kind...

Growth turns into decay turns into growth...

Landscape of incomplete, of unswept, of cut open, of gone...

The monument and its double...

Layers of dust turn into layers of time...

and yet, and yet remains...

what do we see because we want to see?...

ed era pure luce...

zero.............

nothing.............

We explore how stories of an extinct city, Ostia Antica, are excavated, interpreted, broken, transformed and transmitted.

Then we search for new ways to express the questions unearthed,

and question the relationship between forms that convey the non-verbal and forms that rely on language.

The project fosters unpredictable collaborations between artists, writers, scientists, scholars and landscapes from all times.

Our guiding spirits are Ovid and Dante – both of whom quickened the epic tradition with landscapes that unearth the realms of the known and the unknown.

Project(s):

The Argument of Time series was triggered by my first visit to Ostia Antica in 2014. From the moment I stepped through the Porta Romana, the place had an inexplicable hold on me: everything in the landscape spoke to me. By the end of that visit, Ostia was pulsing through my veins. Back in New Jersey, I wrote down the title of all five books in The Argument of Time without any idea what the actual content of each book would be, except that it would be connected to Ostia in some way and that the poems would have to exist in English and Italian.