Ten Gates into the Future

Giulio Bensasson, Souvenir di un domani qualunque, 2024, PVC banner. Photo: Eleonora Cerri Pecorella. The artwork as seen on Porta Portese, Rome, Italy.

A public art project wants you to imagine the future of Rome through vaporwave aesthetics, a feminist fountain, and an existential safari, among others. It is called Ten Gates into the Future (Le 10 porte del futuro) and displays 20 PVC banners, one on each side of the gates of the ancient Aurelian walls.

“Our attempt is to present tourists and citizens with a more contemporary narrative of Rome, a city that would otherwise only live of archaeology,” says Marco Bassan, co-founder alongside Ludovico Pratesi of Spazio Taverna, the curatorial studio behind the initiative.

The placement of these banners has a highly symbolic meaning, as the walls separate the UNESCO-protected center, with its famous monuments, from the modern-day sprawl of high-density towers, condos, and bypasses. It lies between the space tourists experience and the space most Romans inhabit.

Francesca Cornacchini, Disarmo3_no guns needed, 2024. PVC banner. Photo: Eleonora Cerri Pecorella. The artwork as seen on Porta San Paolo, Rome, Italy.

“That is why we chose the gates, as they are a passage between the new and the old,” co-curator Chiara Lorenzetti tells IMPULSE. 

The project is a rare example of contemporary public art in a city that often feels like a permanent encampment over the ruins, paraphrasing a famous aphorism by one of La Dolce Vita’s writers Ennio Flaiano. The inspiration for the exhibition comes from previous experiences, the most important being the 1974 white nylon wrapping of Porta Pinciana by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Porta Pinciana Wrapped, 1974, Rome, Italy.

Ten Gates into the Future won a € 40,000 ($ 43,628) grant from Zetema, a society owned by the city council and responsible for organizing the Roman cultural scene. Curators selected emerging Roman artists in their late 20s and early 30s and paired them with local architects with the help of the Rome-based architecture study WAR.

IMPULSE spoke with four of the artists, starting from the youngest, Federica Di Pietrantonio (b. 1996). Her vaporwave artwork is placed in one of the most distracting urban settings in the city, that of Porta Maggiore. Here, the marble gate stands at the intersection of an ancient aqueduct and funerary monuments dating back to the Imperial era. The ruins are cut by tram and high-speed train lines and several trafficked roads. Solitary among this chaos dangles the artwork of Di Pietrantonio.

Federica Di Pietrantonio, Fontana delle Naiadi / posing with fish and dolphins, 2024, PVC banner, Photo: Eleonora Cerri Pecorella. The artwork as seen on Porta Maggiore, Rome, Italy.

“Since vaporwave is an archeology of the media, I put my piece in relation with the actual Roman archeology,” she tells IMPULSE. 

Making a tribute to the original purpose of the gate, that of welcoming aqueducts, her Fontana delle Naiadi / posing with fish and dolphins proposes a feminist reinterpretation of the actual Fountain of the Naiads (which is in Piazza della Repubblica). Instead of having the Roman god Glaucus choking a dolphin to signify the male dominance over nature, Di Pietrantonio puts her androgynous, nymph-like avatar Aster in digital waters alongside a smiling dolphin and screensaver-like fishes, all rendered in The Sims 4.

Federica Di Pietrantonio, Fontana delle Naiadi / posing with fish and dolphins, 2024. Courtesy of Spazio Taverna.

On a different note, in Porta Metronia, Leonardo Magrelli’s Six Hypotheses for an Archeology of the Future (Sei ipotesi per un'archeologia del futuro) photographs a series of trivial objects as if they were archeological findings. They include a scarf of the AS Roma soccer team, a bottle of cheap Peroni beer—a Roman favorite—and a tourist’s knick-knack of the Pope. There is even an under-construction tape, a ubiquitous presence these days as the city prepares to host the 2025 Vatican Jubilee.

Leonardo Magrelli, Sei ipotesi per un'archeologia del futuro, 2024. Courtesy of Spazio Taverna.

“Here, everywhere you dig, you find artifacts from the daily life of the previous inhabitants of Rome,” says Magrelli, “so I told myself, what will they find of us?” Ironically, near the gate, a construction site for the C subway line was delayed for years after workers unearthed an ancient ruin: the Commander’s Domus.

More ominous is Souvenir from an ordinary future (Souvenir di un domani qualunque) by Giulio Bensasson in Porta Portese. Here, where the eponymous Roman open-air market takes place every Sunday, Bensasson captured on a reversal film a crowd of tourists under “a nuclear, venomous sky,” says the artist. The effect was obtained by letting the film mold from exposure to an organic substance.

Giulio Bensasson, Souvenir di un domani qualunque, 2024. Courtesy of Spazio Taverna.

Bensasson explains he is not projecting an apocalyptic scenario. “It’s just the observation that in the present, we are already used to accepting abnormal things, from climate change to global war,” he says. Indeed, Rome has already experienced a 4°C increase since 1960, according to official data.

A few miles across the Tiber River, near the Pyramid of Cestius—yes, there is an actual pyramid in Rome—Francesca Cornacchini links the feminist history of the Resistance against Nazi-fascism in Porta San Paolo to a 1990s Tomb Raider video game. In Disarmo3_no guns needed, she captures the result of an “existential safari,” a liminal re-exploration of a videogame done through cheat codes that override the level's challenges. The codes represent the baggage of knowledge and emotional maturity of adulthood winning over childhood's fears.

Francesca Cornacchini, Disarmo3_no guns needed, 2024. Courtesy of Spazio Taverna.

“The question is: how would I face the same journey now that I’m a 30-year-old woman?” Cornacchini says. The picture, captured from gameplay, shows the character of Lara Croft engulfed by lions—the antagonists of ancient Rome’s level—as if they were a dress. Without the stress of the video game’s dynamics, Lara Croft appears to peacefully lend a free hand to the viewer, who would originally hold a gun in the game. The artwork is dedicated to Marisa Musu, a partisan who took part in the attack against a Nazi battalion in Via Rasella in 1944.

The curators’ intention to reinterpret Rome through contemporary lenses is not new and adds up to an ongoing process. Honorable mentions are Federico Fellini’s movie Roma (1972), the namesake character in Stefano Tamburini’s comic book Ranxerox (1978-1985)—a super-violent android of lumpen extraction, in a cyberpunk Rome where the Colosseum turned in a hotel of concrete, and writers like Valerio Mattioli, who proposed a fascinating explanation for the chaotic urban identity of the city’s sprawl in the 2019 essay Remoria.

Leonardo Magrelli, Sei ipotesi per un'archeologia del futuro, 2024, PVC banner. Photo: Eleonora Cerri Pecorella. The artwork as seen on Porta Metronia, Rome, Italy.

However, since it can be highly conceptual, the Ten Gates into the Future project can be of difficult interpretation for passersby even if every artwork is paired with a QR code. The position of the banners also matters, as they are at times too far away from the viewers. However, the curators are pretty happy with the results. They say they received a lot of positive feedback. “There were even people who went and looked at all the gates,” says co-curator Bassan, which, given Rome’s dimensions and traffic, is an outstanding achievement.

Ten Gates into the Future is on view in Rome until August 26, 2024.

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