The word plant emerges from two Latin origins: planta, to sprout; and plantare, to fix in place. One origin insinuates movement, the other stasis. This modest etymology suggests an entry into the central argument of Rosetta Elkin’s research: plants are objectified as a fixed form of human knowledge such that it is difficult to appreciate their aliveness. Elkin will discuss the possibility that a plant is a process, a swarm of activity, and a dynamic planetary force, in order to learn how new types of practices can emerge in the reciprocal relations, or co-production, between plant and human life.

Rosetta S. Elkin is the Garden Club of America Rome Prize Fellow in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome and Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She is also associate at Arnold Arboretum.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Namsal Siedlecki, the Cy Twombly Italian Affiliated Fellow in Visual Arts, will give a shoptalk on his recent work.

Ugo Monneret de Villard (Milan 1881–Rome 1954) devoted his life to the study of artistic interchange between the Christian and Islamic cultures of the medieval world. Born in a recently unified Italy, his life and career were set against the backdrop of historical events and disruptions, such as the two world wars and the rise and fall of the Fascist regime. Monneret’s multifaceted profile will be outlined based on unpublished documents and correspondence, as well as on the critical analysis of his extensive publications. The life, work and travels of this eclectic scholar, illustrated by his extraordinary photographic archives, will thus become a lens on Italian cultural history, among nationalism, colonialism, and Orientalism.

Silvia Armando is the Italian Fellow in medieval studies at the American Academy in Rome.

The shoptalk will be held in English.

During the second half of the seventh century BCE, a group of Greek islanders set sail for North Africa and founded the city of Cyrene, in present-day Libya. Thanks to both its contacts with local populations and its fertile land, Cyrene was soon to become one of the most prosperous cities in the Greek world. While ancient historians tell us little about the city’s history after the classical period, much information about Cyrene’s history can be recovered through the analysis of local inscriptions. In particular, these documents shed much light on Cyrene’s exploitation of Libyan countryside and its connections with local artistic productions.

Emilio Rosamilia is the Italian Fellow in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome and a scholar at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Mari Yoko Hara, Samuel H. Kress Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, will give her shoptalk entitled Illusionism and Ekphrasis: Baldassarre Peruzzi’s sala delle prospettive and the Notion of Invention in Renaissance Architecture.

In 1965, the Italian artist and designer Bruno Munari released the Tetracono with an event and exhibition at the Danese Milano showroom, inviting spectators to “… meet the Tetracono” as if it was a person. Instead, Tetracono is a product, an austere 15 cm black steel cube housing four aluminum cones, each painted half red and half green, designed to spin at four distinct speeds on an eighteen-minute cycle. Its function is to “show forms while they are in the process of becoming.” Taking the form of a product launch or software demo, David Reinfurt will informally present his work over the last four months at the American Academy reanimating this strange product/artwork and will address the fertile grey areas between art and design and how this territory has shifted in the meantime.

Reinfurt is the Mark Hampton Rome Prize Fellow in Design at the American Academy in Rome and lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts at Princeton University.

The shoptalk will be held in English.

Yasmin Vobis will present recent built work by her office Ultramoderne in conjunction with ongoing research in Rome, which focuses on the underexplored problem of color and tonality in architecture. Her research probes how systems of color interact with modernist preoccupations such as space, structure and organization, and explores ways of drawing color and space simultaneously.

Vobis is the Founders/Arnold W. Brunner/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome. She is principal at Ultramoderne and critic at the Rhode Island School of Design.

The shoptalk will be held in English. You can watch this event at https://livestream.com/aarome.

The tombs of Rome have been studied since the beginnings of classical archaeology as a discipline. Traditionally, the focus of this engagement is squarely on individual monuments. My project attempts to broaden the perspective toward chronological changes in the entire funerary landscape. Individual monuments are still an important aspect of this narrative, but the story also promises to capture the funerary culture of Rome on an urban scale.

Dorian Borbonus is the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman/National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome and associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

The shoptalk will be held in English. You can watch this event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

On the Apulian coast of South Italy during the 12th and 13th centuries, church building and commerce boomed alongside each other. To what extent did the stimulus of trade help to forge an interconnected architectural industry in the region? Williams probes this question in the example of the church of S. Corrado in Molfetta. The talk will zero in on the data of photogrammetry--the reproduction of a building's three-dimensional structure using photographs--as evidence for themes such as the standardization of materials and the division of labor between quarry and construction site.

Joseph Williams is the Phyllis W.G. Gordan / Lily Auchincloss / Samuel H. Kress Foundation Rome Prize Fellow in Medieval Studies at the American Academy in Rome and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, North Carolina.

The shoptalk will be held in English. You can watch this event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

The monuments of the medieval Mediterranean were beneficiaries of a considerable mobilization of knowledge. Construction techniques—especially approaches to structural geometry—were not simply the product of isolated local traditions; they were transmitted between far-flung coastlines, adapted to exploit the versatility of local materials, and flexed to generate a range of forms and spaces. A close look at the circulation and change of a particular constructional solution—the squinch dome—and its relationship to the geography of road networks, travel routes, and patronage on the Adriatic coast of Italy, hints at systemic links between the cosmopolitan repertoires of builders and the changing structures of Mediterranean trade.

Joseph Williams is the Phyllis W. G. Gordan/Lily Auchincloss/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Medieval Studies at the American Academy in Rome. He holds a PhD from the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it at https://livestream.com/aarome.