Rome hypothesis: an eco-myth ontology to regenerate, once again, the World City. Practices, politics and poetics to escape from Contemporaneity. What can we still learn from Rome? The master’s program hypothesizes that Rome can express an interpretative paradigm of the world, an alternative cosmology to the dominant one of the Contemporary. A cosmology based on three elements that have mythically and historically allowed Rome to regenerate itself through historical eras, thus guaranteeing it eternity, as well as universality, that is, the ability to extend to the point of almost coinciding with the world itself. The hypothesis is that Rome is a complex form of life, a sympoietic eco-myth-system, with its own emerging organization capable of evolving spontaneously and self-regenerating over time. A living reality, both mythological and ecological, characterized by the ability to include every otherness that could otherwise lead it to the end, this is what its eternity would consist of, or that could limit the expansion of its urban form to the entire planet, this would instead consist of its universality. Thus Rome has always confronted and included: wild nature, its alter ego Latium; foreigners, cyclically summoned to regenerate the city; and time itself, conceived as circular so as to make the origin and end of the points of tangency of a potentially infinite temporal continuum. This hypothesis is contradicted by the ideology of human domination over the environment, typical of modernity, which has dominated urban development in the last 150 years in the attempt to realize a thesis, that of Rome as Modern Capital, the fulfillment of which risks definitively canceling the hypothesis Rome, World City. The conflict between the Rome City World hypothesis and the Rome Capital thesis is not yet widely perceived, but its battlegrounds are precisely the meaning and role that wild nature, foreigners and time have in the transformation of the city.
The program will investigate this hypothesis by weaving the practice of Stalker who in 30 years has created a continuous cosmogonic action aimed at exploring/narrating/imagining the reality of Rome with the traces of the myth that would like the eternal and universal city. The one between Stalker and the Rome hypothesis is a mutual construction created starting from the exploration, narration and celebration of the most marginal, unmentioned and opaque aspects of contemporary history and the social and environmental realities of the city. The center of the investigation are those edges of the city, irreducible to clear boundaries, territories of confrontation with otherness, unplanned or regulated spaces in which the spontaneous comparison between the ruins of the past and the life forms that find refuge there generates highly different, insurgent bio and socio, “adjacent possibilities” in which a new principle of reality can be regenerated within the folds of a reality now in exhaustion. The Rome hypothesis is therefore a construction site open to the verification of emerging eco-social processes, to the complex study of their natural and urban history, as well as to the experimentation of human practices and theories that can demonstrate their consistency on a local and planetary scale. An open construction site to verify if and how the Rome City World hypothesis can constitute a socio-ecological perspective of escape from the irresponsible, reductive and violent human attempt to dominate others and destroy life on the planet.