When In Rome - A Polyphonic Site-Intervention in the World's Smallest Capital City
Valletta
Khaled Barakeh, Benedikte Bjerre, Elisa Caldana, Oscar Carlson, Ann Cathrin November Høibø, Rasmus Johannsen, Vytautas Jurevicius, Patrick Keaveny, Aki Nagasaka, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Filippa-Linn Pettersson, Beto Shwafaty, John Skoog, Simon Starling, Franziska von Stenglin and Jol Thomson
14.06.2011 - 16.06.2011
Following a research visit to Malta in early 2012, a group of artists from the Städelschule, Frankfurt, working alongside British artist Simon Starling, developed a collaborative project with Malta Contemporary Art Foundation that responds to the layered histories, contradictions, and shifting identities embedded within the city of Valletta.
Positioned between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, Malta occupies a unique geopolitical and cultural position. A former colonial outpost, contemporary tourist destination, film set, strategic military location, and migratory crossroads, the island continues to function as a site where multiple narratives overlap and compete. When In Rome takes this condition as its starting point.
Over the course of three days, the project unfolded across Valletta through a series of simultaneous actions performed throughout the city. Each action took the form of a re-enactment of an artwork realised elsewhere in the world during the previous four decades. Individually, these interventions operated as subtle gestures within the urban fabric; collectively, they generated a complex and polyphonic mapping of the city.
Centred around the legacy of Francis Alÿs and his poetic investigations of urban space through walking, tracing, carrying, dragging, and mapping, the project also incorporated works by artists including Gabriel Orozco and David Hammons. Removed from their original contexts and relocated within Valletta's dense historical environment, these actions became both quotations and transformations, generating new meanings through displacement and repetition.
Throughout the city, visitors might encounter a Coldstream Guardsman wandering unfamiliar streets, a musician searching for the missing half of an instrument, a sweater slowly unravelling behind its wearer, the persistent sound of a kicked tin can, or a painting moving through public space. These gestures appeared and disappeared within the rhythms of daily life, creating fleeting disruptions to the city's established order.
Rather than producing a singular exhibition, When In Rome proposed the city itself as an exhibition space and active participant. Through the layering of historical references, artistic appropriations, and performative actions, Valletta became a temporary field of accumulated narratives, where past and present, local and international, original and copy, continuously intersected.
The project ultimately examined how place is constructed through memory, movement, representation, and repetition. By overlaying multiple artistic histories onto one of Europe's most densely layered urban environments, When In Rome transformed Valletta into a living archive of gestures, inviting audiences to reconsider the ways in which cities are experienced, narrated, and imagined.
This version places the project more firmly within contemporary discourses around site-specificity, reenactment, authorship, and urban mapping, which I think was one of the most interesting aspects of the project.