Eva Sajovic, UAL Fine Arts Research Fellow, speaks about the work she has produced during her residency at the BSR ahead of the Summer Open Studios 2025.
Developed during my UAL Fine Art Research Fellowship at the British School at Rome, Rise and Fall of a Temple explores the ideological pillars of empire—tracing their origins in Ancient Rome and examining their enduring presence within contemporary power structures. The project asks what might emerge from their collapse—not with fear, but with hope of providing an opening for dialogue, imagination, and agency.
Building on my earlier project #end_of_empire, in which colonial symbols were reimagined as textile wombs holding community voices, Rise and Fall of a Temple deepens this enquiry by confronting the ideological foundations of empire. It asks how we might rework empire’s ruins into tools for empathy, renewal, and collective conversation. The temple becomes a stage for rethinking dominant narratives and audiences to participate in its (de)construction.
In developing this body of work, I’ve drawn on Rome’s long history of appropriation and layering, particularly through spolia: the reuse of architectural fragments embedded within new structures. One of the key sites that informed my thinking was the Basilica of San Clemente, an architectural palimpsest where layers of history visibly coexist.
As I explored ways of challenging and subverting established structures of power and support, I was drawn to Rome’s turned-out columns and exposed supports; to the ornate borders framing frescoes in churches such as Santa Maria in Trastevere and Santa Cecilia; and to ancient sources including the Tomb of Reliefs at the Cerveteri Necropolis and fragmented war scenes on Etruscan vases. Raphael’s Massacre of the Innocents tapestries at the Vatican Museums also remain an important point of reference.
These visual and conceptual references became a scaffold—supporting a practice that seeks not only to unravel symbols of dominance but also to reframe them, offering alternative readings and potential new meanings.
Rather than overstate what the work is or does, I’d like to close this reflection with the words of fellow BSR resident, James Drysdale Miller, whose text speaks with sharp clarity to the questions this work holds:
Woe to that sacrificial priest, First craftsman of the blacksmith’s forge, Who saw strange shapes within his fire, And hammered out illgotten swords.
“What of the supposedly eternal city would Eugenius recognize over a thousand years later? In response, one runs to structures, first physical, then—perhaps—more abstract. His lament remains, however, as tragically pertinent a condemnation of our own age as it was both of his own ninth century and of the 1920s of his translator. Eva Sajovic’s work likewise invites us to question the relationship between temples and weapons, warriors, priests and craftsmen. Footage of the assembly (and collapse) of a carboard temple on the steps of the British School, disarticulated tapestries of swords and renaissance leaders, and woollen figures who descend the studio’s walls transform quarried stone and hammered iron into softer (less harsh, less durable) materials. In turn, they compel the viewer to become complicit collaborators, to reassemble the ‘liberators of their (of our?) fatherland’, though in the retelling their liberation comes not at the end of a sword. The tapestries of dissolved images accuse us, offering us their strange shapes to hammer out again.
But in their prognosis the corrupting climbing figures look not back to an age before Tubalcain but forwards to a time to come, when temple walls have collapsed and when warriors wear fuzzy wool and carry mops. How and what will they build? Building a new world out of the remains of the old was a challenge known to Eugenius and his contemporaries, whether they dwelt in houses erected in the ruins of Nerva’s Forum or supported new churches with old columns. Yet in forging such a world, it is often easier to leave columns standing than to begin again; to borrow from the old, and in turn to be indebted to it. Inside the blocks of restacked marble, in temples which look like sepulchres, old spirits can hide.”
