Alison B. Hirsch and Aroussiak Gabrielian

Alison B. Hirsch & Aroussiak Gabrielian

Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize
8 settembre 2017–27 luglio 2018
Professione
Cofounders, Foreground Design Agency, Los Angeles
Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, School of Architecture, University of Southern California (Hirsch)
PhD Candidate in Media Arts and Practice, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California (Gabrielian)
Titolo del progetto
Rome Real-and-Imagined: Cinematic Fictions and Future Landscapes
Descrizione del progetto

Centuries of artistic visions and written narratives of the Eternal City tell stories of Rome’s triumphant past (and decay), filling the voids between fragmentary facts with imaginary fictions. The city as it exists today–in both the social imagination and in physical manifestation—is shaped by the accrual of these stories through time. Relying on landscape’s affiliation with narrative and the cinematic, we aim to disrupt the tension between legends of the ancient city and realities of everyday life by unearthing nondominant narratives—in the city and in the archives—and playing them out in the landscape using immersive cinematic techniques including “live” renderings projected in situ. Through the conflation of fact and fiction, past and present, the project will speculate on Rome’s possible futures. These cinematic experiments will be complemented by writings on Rome as a landscape shaped by its particular social realities and its cinematic imaginaries. Both image and text will provide alternatives to Rome’s current trajectories, aiming to release the restraints reality has on our ability to dream.