Faculty Ken Ueno

SIX MEMOS FROM A YEAR IN ROME
Second Memo: COMMUNITY EXTENDED
By Dr. Ken Ueno

Last Sunday, I was up until 4am down the hill from the Academy at the Good Café, watching the Patriots beating the Colts for 59 minutes. The last two minutes...those last two minutes, made the next day's recovery from the 4am bedtime all the more difficult.

Ever since planning this series of articles from Rome, I had intended to follow Calvino's model, having each installment, each "Memo," be a contemplation on a different aspect of life here in Rome and at the Academy. However, life presents surprises along the way (say, for example, how the SuperBowl party I was planning thinking of planning has to be reassessed, due to last Sunday's events). Not all surprises are bad. I had been planning the next episode of my series, what I had intended to write at this present sitting, to feature contemplations about layers of history evident in churches and archeological sites, and their impact on my current creative work's direction. That article will have to wait as this past week, the day after, the Patriots' debacle, arrived David Williams and Andrew Zientek, two UMass students to visit me. Dave is an up-and-coming electronic musician and composer, and Andrew is a graduate student in the visual arts program with a background in landscape architecture. They collaborate on creating installations (interactive spaces expresses as an art form - yea, it's hip!). Last year, one of their works was installed in the empty bank space across the street from the Star Store in downtown New Bedford. This past semester, their second work was presented in the CVPA Campus Gallery on the main campus.

It was great to have them here for a week. This meant there was time enough for them, hopefully, to get an introduction to Rome (there's too much here to get to really know it even in a week), as well as a taste for what life is like at the American Academy They ate meals with us and were able to make some studio visits with three of my fellow fellows whose work most relate to their installation making. The first met with the landscape architect Jose Parral who is currently working on an installation for his open studio show this coming Tuesday (yours truly composed music for the video projection). He spent time this fall documenting and analyzing the use of public spaces in Rome. The mapped out nodes of activity in piazzas and gathered data about the density and speed of human traffic through those spaces. All this might sound dry and hyper-analytical, but what's amazing is that he has a special talent for translating this intellectual stuff into drawings and films, which somehow express the content of this analysis in a beautiful and appealing way. Next, Dave and Andrew met with the digital animator Josh Mosley (a professor at the University of Pennsylvania). He makes bronze sculptures, which he then three-d scans into a computer and animates. This is a very labor-intensive process (some of his works takes three years to make, but then are sold to galleries and shown at major festivals). Josh's current work is a poetic rendering of a fictional dialogue between Rousseau and Pascal, two French philosophers from the Age of Enlightenment. His characters have a sense of whimsy about them, and when they "talk" they exchange musical gestures (he writes the music too!). Recently, Josh recorded a Viola da Gamba (an old Renaissance instrument which is a pre-cursor to the modern cello - it has frets like a guitar) with the intent of using it to represent this dialogue between the two great philosophers. During their meeting with Josh, Josh asked Dave and Andrew to watch his current work-in-progress, and invited them to offer suggestions. Dave, who is one of the top students in the Music Technology program at UMass, happily obliged. On another day, they met with the landscape architect Willet Moss, who is a partner in a firm based in San Francisco. During his time in Rome, Willet has been looking at spaces whose use has transformed in ways unpredictable to their designers. One such place is a military installation built by Mussolini in the periphery of the city. Rogue hipsters have squatted there and have converted the space into living quarters, a coffee house, and an art house movie theater. Mostly, though, Willet has concentrated on thinking about one particular stairway leading to the Tempietto, a building by Bramante, marking the legendary spot where St. Peter was supposed to have been crucified. All three fellows were very generous with their time in meeting Dave and Andrew. They not only did they talked about their own work, but also encouraged them to show them their work.

Dave and Andrew also had time to see the sites. Being as their creative work involves creating spaces, I wanted to show them two of my favorite churches: the Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, which is considered Bernini's masterpiece, and the San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, affectionally called "San Carlino" by locals ("Carlino" is an diminutive version of Carlo - the space is small and intimate), which is considered Borrommini's masterpiece. Both churches feature an unusual floor plan, intricate decorative work, and a complex dome. The San Carlino is poetry expressed in architecture. But one space outdoes them all: the Pantheon. After seeing the two churches, we walked back towards the Academy and stopped by the Pantheon. It was raining. The oculus, the hole open to the sky at the apex of the dome, was a glow in white. The rain shimmered like flames around the oculus, and every once in a while; a drop of hail floated down like a petal, its frequency like that a shooting star among summer constellations. Having now glimpsed at the face of transcendence, all Dave and Andrew have to do is spend the rest of their lives trying to transcribe it into their work. To console them, I took them to get banana gelato at Giolitti's (Rome's best gelateria), to experience another form of transcendence (remember, only get banana gelato if it's grey, it means to they didn't put artificial coloring in it).