Most people go to Rome to see its ancient history, but the city offers many possible excursions through different eras, from the Roman Empire and earlier periods to the Baroque, modern and contemporary eras. When it comes to the interplay between contemporary art and the layers of the past embedded in the city’s terrain, the art space FOROF is perhaps the best example – both for its founding history and its programmes. It brings contemporary art to the heart of ancient Rome, creating opportunities for fertile dialogue not only between different eras and aesthetics but on themes that recur throughout the history of human civilization.
When excavations begin for a new development in Rome, ruins will almost certainly be found. So it was no surprise that when Alda Fendi took over Palazzo Roccagiovine, directly in front of Trajan’s Column, the past resurfaced once the renovation process began. The building had housed a printing shop for years, but once excavations began to transform the space into the future home of Alda Fendi Esperimenti, ancient marble floors began to appear. The Fendi Foundation eventually found its home elsewhere, in the Vilabro neighbourhood, in a complex of historic buildings restored by Jean Nouvel and now transformed into luxury hotel apartments and the Renoucheros Cultural Complex.
This precise location next to Trajan’s Column was taken over by her daughter Giovanna Caruso Fendi, who launched FOROF in the remains of what had once been an important part of the Church of Olbia within Trajan’s Forum – one of the symbolic centers of Roman imperial power, designed by Apollodorus of Damascus. Its underground spaces preserve an exceptional part of the eastern apse with its original polychrome marble floors – “Giallo Antico”, “Pavonazzetto” and “Verdi Africano” – and, most importantly, the place where emancipation took place, the public act through which the enslaved regained their freedom.
“What struck me from the beginning was not only the archaeological value of the site, but its ability to speak to the present,” Caruso Fendi told the Observer during a tour of the site. “To descend into the foundations of Olbia Cathedral means to immerse yourself in the depths of ancient Rome, but it also means to enter a short circuit between past, present and future.”
After this discovery, Caruso Fendi felt a calling to restore this unique place, which had been dormant for more than 15 years. Launched in 2022 as a charitable community, FOROF is designed as a unique hybrid cultural space where contemporary artists are invited into a face-to-face encounter with the presence and history of the city. FOROF’s underground space was renovated by IT’S Studio and today hosts context-specific contemporary art exhibitions featuring newly commissioned works and reworked pieces in dialogue with archaeological remains. “The old is not a background, but an active presence that adapts and transforms everything it encounters,” Caruso Fendi emphasizes. “The result is a space of resonance between different temporalities – archaeological, human and geological – that overlap without canceling each other out.” Each of the site-specific exhibitions lasts approximately nine months and is activated through a series of monthly events called Episodes: interdisciplinary performative interventions that include and invite other artists.
To date, there are many case studies that demonstrate how contemporary practices can revitalize, valorize and even help preserve ancient heritage. However, although these practices are increasingly widespread, and although the biennial model has encouraged symbiotic interventions between past and contemporary heritage, there is still significant resistance in Italy and Rome. Caruso Fendi attributes this to Italy’s multi-layered, identity-bound heritage, which is often seen as something to be frozen over time rather than activated. With FOROF, the challenge was to show that revitalization does not mean change, but deeper understanding. “It is not about imposing oneself on history,” she says, “but about creating new possibilities for interpretation.” “Contemporary art has the power to ask questions, to create short circuits in time, and to make visible again what we stop seeing out of habit.”
She believes that working on an archaeological site such as the Church of Olbia requires absolute respect, but also a willingness to accept that history is never silent. Every site-specific intervention is born from an ongoing dialogue with the place and its memory.
A compelling example of this is Alicia Coady’s current show “INFRASUPRA.” In it, the internationally acclaimed Polish artist based in Berlin engages in a carefully calibrated dialogue with both the history and essence of space, staging a confrontation between temporal and spatial dimensions in a theatrical stratified field of archaeological, geological and cosmological time. Coady works sculpturally across different scales, materials, and temporalities, treating site as both material and metaphor.
It seems like the perfect location for an artist like Coady, who has long explored and questioned the structure of reality—the frameworks that humans have built to rule, shape, and attempt to contain the unbridled entropic nature of all the phenomena that underpin the dissolution of everyday life over time. By constructing sculptures and installations that propose new modes of coexistence between the anthropological and the natural, Coady reveals how architecture, engineering, mathematics, history, and even our sense of time are anthropocentric: conceptual structures invented to contain a universe in constant motion, shaped by the turbulent circulation of matter and energy, indifferent to our desire for permanence and tending instead toward instability, dissolution, and chance.
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“Infrasopra“ |
The main installation encapsulates the dynamic encounter between human time, archaeological time, geological time and cosmological time. Located within the archaeological zone, this intervention amplifies the interesting stratification of material and perception. Black felt highlights the gaps in the original marble floors, making these ancient shards look like islands floating in a dark pool, or celestial bodies suspended in the cosmos. The archaeological suddenly becomes something cosmic: another world, lying in extraordinary silence, suspended between time and space. In the former hall of freedom, where emancipation once took place, Heavy light It assumes an almost astral charge: the suspended stones appear to be a constellation, a galaxy, a certain idea, in an impossible balance between different forces. Coady turns mass and gravity into philosophical and spiritual problems in a work that seems to question whether human history can still be understood in human terms alone, or whether it must be rethought within a broader universe in which every structure, body, and civilization is merely a temporary arrangement of matter. Even the shadows cast by the stones appear like ghosts—remnants of vanished systems of belief, power, and labor that once passed through the site.
At the heart of the show is the question of perception and time. Caruso Fendi describes it as an invitation to rethink our relationship with history and the present – and that is what she wants FOROF to be: a place where the past continues to generate the future through the vision of contemporary artists, and where heritage does not crystallize but is constantly recirculated through new forms of experience, sensitivity and thought.
Previous seasons of FOROF programming have brought other international artists into dialogue with the site’s densely stratified history, including the irreverent Austrian group Geletin, Augustus Serabinas, Alex Cecchetti, and Thomas Doxiadis. The project also creates new opportunities for engagement and building knowledge and appreciation of heritage among the local community, especially among younger audiences. This desire to educate and raise awareness is evident in the visitor path itself, which invites people to delve into the history of the site before encountering contemporary works.
From the beginning, Caruso Fendi envisioned FOROF as a place to experience, not just visit. “I was interested in creating a space for gathering, exchange and active engagement, inspired by the spirit of the historic cafés of the 20th century avant-garde, from Voltaire’s cabaret to Giacomo Balla’s tic-tac-toe, and the post-war Roman art club,” she says. “These were places where artists, intellectuals and the public exchanged ideas, experiences and visions. For this reason, the FOROF audience is never just a spectator.”
FOROF was also not designed as a private foundation, but rather as a project organized through a relatively new legal form available in Italy for cultural organizations, the SRL Società Benefit. For Caruso Fendi, this choice reflects the desire to create positive social impact and shared value through cultural activity: “I chose to reinvest all the revenues produced back into the artistic and cultural project, so that FOROF can remain an accessible place, open to dialogue, and able to create lasting links with the territory and the community.” This legal and business structure also makes the public a stakeholder, encouraging new forms of micro-sponsorship and fundraising built on community engagement.
Caruso Fendi says the audience response has been great. A multi-sectoral community has formed around FOROF, made up of residents, scholars, tourists, occasional visitors and young people looking for new experiences. “This transformation is perhaps the most important result: the transition from visitation to relationship. I want FOROF to have an impact above all on the way people see. Liberating the gaze of those who enter here, through art and culture: this is perhaps the most important goal. Teaching people to observe heritage not as something distant or inanimate, but as a living material, still able to speak to the present.”
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