Inertia_2006_Irene

City Scape Rome

In her large drawing on chalk paper ‘Cityscape Rome’ (2006) Dutch artist Irene Janze blends human history with geological history. Janze brings us to one day in the history of the Eternal City of Rome: the 7th of April 2005, the day of the funeral of Pope John Paul II. We don’t see the funeral itself, we zoom in on its human ‘left-overs’ and even go down into the earth’s layers of Rome’s geological sediments.

Photo: Irene Janze, Rome 7-4-2005

‘Cityscape Rome’ is a complex storyboard, lusciously colored and tenderly drawn on cartographic chalk paper. From a satellite’s perspective we zoom in on Rome, the meandering Tiber river, the architecture, streets, cobbles and left-overs of the funeral’s media event: papal souvenirs and the rubbish left by the pelgrims in huge piles on the streets. And further the ‘storyboard’ goes, zooming in on what is beneath the streets of Rome: layers of tuff, the volcanic detritus on which Rome has been built. And further we go back into geological time, through a cartography of Italy’s sediments.and soil.

Standing before ‘Cityscape Rome’ one might be overcome by a feeling of reverence towards the way human history is caught up by the geological history of our planet.