A conversation with Ash Tower, Samstag Scholar in the Visual Arts, in which he speaks about the work he has produced during his residency at the BSR from September to December 2024, ahead of the Winter Open Studios.
I arrived at the British School at the end of June, and immediately began by taking the school’s Postgraduate Course in Roman Epigraphy. It was a whirlwind tour over 10 days, encompassing museums and archaeological sites, and the classicists and archaeologists on the course provided some incredible expertise into the inscriptions and texts we saw. In retrospect the packed schedule was probably all that prevented my total paralysis in the city, and after the course was over, I was left to wander and try to construct a map of my surroundings. Much of my early work was a process of coming to terms with the city. I was constantly looking upwards amongst the hills and monuments which seemed to draw the eye up into visions of grand splendour.
I spent the summer magnetised to the sky. I’d walk the city (when the shadows were longer) and watch the constant contrails from planes, and on the clear nights I’d look up at the stars and spot satellites. The work I began making early on reflected the facades and portals that I was seeing in the city, but inflected through domestic oratories or portable shrines; detailed altars for worship at home (like those in Galleria Borghese).
During this time, I became interested in the Madonelle, or ‘little Madonnas’—Marian shrines which appear on the corners along the streets in Rome. Something feels significant about their place on the corners, on intersecting trajectories through the city. I’ve been reflecting on their placements at crossroads and the crossroads’ associations with being in-between. It feels different from the interiors of the churches, whose symmetrical plans place their altars in the centre. The Madonelle seem more interstitial, perched on the corner above the chaos of the street, but casting a watchful eye onto the world below.
My initial impression of Rome was a city clamouring upwards, which combined with subterranean adventures (like the Basilica of Saint Clement, the Catacombs of Saints Marcellino and Pietro, the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian, and various columbaria) gives the impression of a vast city stretching above and below. This fixation on the sky was drawn back into focus in early September, when the Arch of Constantine was struck by lightning, knocking off a corner. It felt like a moment where the sky was reaching down, in a distinctly physical but also divine sense. I began to see the monuments of Rome—particularly the obelisks—as lightning rods, in a scientific sense but also as points of touch between the terrestrial and the divine.
The next lead came while chasing a loose end in the 1951 mass-poisoning in the French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit. Following some pre-Rome work about conspiracies, I had been reading about the history of hallucinogenic experimentation and the CIA’s covert experiments in the 1950s through to the 1970s. While investigating the poisoning of Pont-Saint-Esprit (commonly believed to be Ergot poisoning) I was directed towards the work of Piero Camporesi, an Italian cultural historian whose work on early modern Italy is apparently quite well-known (though new to me).
Camporesi’s work describes early modern Italy as a time of wandering delirium arising from widespread famine, and the thinning of the boundaries between sleep, death, dreams, and hallucinations. In Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (1983), he investigates how famine resulted in peasants altering the recipes of their bread to incorporate foraged elements and ‘stretch’ their wheat supply, resulting in both malnutrition and hallucinogenic exhaustion. Camporesi extends this journey into “stupefaction and collective vertigo” (Bread of Dreams, p.42) in The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore (1983):
“A tendency to flight, to nocturnal journeys, to dream-like visions, all belonged to the hard business of living. […] Ultimately, the widespread practice of anointing was perhaps not so far removed from the many paths of expression that mass escapism took (even if only in fantasy) into forbidden and impossible areas. […] Whole communities, whether rural or from mountain regions, entire valleys fell into long-drawn nocturnal, wintry and senile lethargies and hibernated with ointments and potions.” (The Incorruptible Flesh, p.22)
Throughout his work Camporesi refers to ‘upside-down’ or inverted worlds, and places emphasis on visions in the sky, quoting Italian philosopher Tomasso Campanella: “future things are foreseen in the air”. Camporesi continues, describing this aspect of exhausted malnutrition as “an aerial theatre that prefigured to men the ‘signs’ of things to come: a symbolic reading of the future conducted with eyes raised upwards.” (Bread of Dreams, p.21) This seems so fitting for the ‘aboveness’ and ‘belowness’ of Rome; an upwards city of stars, domes, and spires, but also a downwards city of catacombs, tombs, and endless excavation.
With all this talk of futures in the sky, and a city gesturing upwards, it became impossible to ignore the syncretic prominence of the star in my walks through the city. Its different forms are recycled and reused in so many symbolic systems in Rome, and its lore is splintered and ripe for telling tales in the gaps. Stars and other celestial phenomena are frequently understood as augurs of the future (a historic Roman tradition), so I found myself making stars, modelled on the ones atop the obelisks.
While researching my atmospheric fixation in Camporesi’s work, I also chanced upon another lead. In his discussion of famine and the peasant classes (and their frequent conflation with vermin or plague), Camporesi also describes malnutrition caused by ‘vulgar breads’ (mixed with various herbs and additives as an extender or tonic) rendering the body susceptible to worms and other parasites, which were understood as demonic and merciless:
“It was commonly believed that the worms were gifted with ‘cunning and sagacity’, and moved within the bodily maze with an astonishing knowledge of the terrain. Driven by hunger, when the host body was itself empty and starving, they ascended from the depths of the intestines towards the throat.” (Bread of Dreams, p.158)
Alongside their ‘cunning and sagacity’ it was also said that these worms possessed an unnatural knowledge of the future:
“But, lively and almost indestructible, it was they themselves who abandoned the human body as death approached. A quite certain sign and portent of the exitus and unequivocal signal of the final marasmus was the flight from dying flesh of these slimy and very sticky inhabitants of the dark, warm and damp recesses of the body. […] The animals were able to pick up and interpret much in advance those obscure signals of ruin and death that remained unintelligible to men.” (Bread of Dreams, p.159)
The mention of worms, augury, or divine knowledge led me inevitably to another notable source from this period. Carlo Ginzburg’s book, The Cheese and the Worms (1980), in which he examines the cosmology of Menocchio, a miller in Montereale, who (upon being questioned in 1584 by the inquisition) explained his unique understanding of church teachings with a metaphor of putrefying cheese:
“I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” (The Cheese and the Worms, p.5-6)
I found myself making these piles of worms and thinking about them moving as a great mass. I thought about their slightly sickening churning as a different form of future from the brilliant and sharp stars. Reminiscent of Camporesi’s evocation of an ‘upside-down world,’ Menocchio invokes the blind and terrestrial worm-angel as being privy to vision unknown to humans. Stars and worms seem like an unlikely pair in divination, but there’s something in the idea of a star-gazing worm, and the contemplation of great distance and ruin. I think the next step is to make something that draws these two distant augurs together.
