TRESPASS
Rome, Italy
Trespass is an installation that works with an existing dark space to evoke and amplify the mystery, fear, and delicacy of a space as it falls into darkness. The work re-creates a ladder that dives down into the Aqua Traiana, an abandoned Roman aqueduct that cuts under the American Academy in Rome’s McKim, Mead and White Building. Attentive to the antiquity, the work does not physically touch any portion of the ancient waterway, and instead hovers amongst its dark spaces. Made of wax and wire, the work is ephemeral and impossible to occupy. Instead, the mind is left to assume an occupation and the decent down into the darkness. Trespass directly taps into the human tendency to imagine and project the spaces that, when lost to darkness, we cannot see. Spilling out on to the floor, and lit from afar, the ground becomes untrusted and the occupant is dared to venture into the darkness.
This project was supported by the Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome and the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan.