Submerged World

Rome, like Venice—though in a different way—is also a city of water. The Tiber played an essential role in its founding, so much so that one hypothesis regarding the etymology of the city’s name maintains that it derives from its archaic designation, Rumon or Rumen (whose root comes from ruo, meaning “I flow”), and that Rome therefore means “City on the River.” After centuries of flooding, at the end of the nineteenth century the decision to build very high embankments—the Muraglioni—interrupted the dialogue between Rome and its waters. Today the city is distant from the river: it is visible only when crossing the bridges. Along its banks, far below street level, sounds arrive muffled, and one no longer feels in the center of a great city but in another place altogether—a space of decay and nature, slow-paced, where garbage and informal settlements coexist with herons, kingfishers, willows, reeds, and wild fig trees.

Always attentive to the aesthetics of the margin, to the “epiphany of something that is hidden and reveals itself,” Iginio De Luca has explored the banks of the Tiber, focusing on what its muddy, dark riverbed conceals in the shallower waters near the shore, where currents are weaker and whirlpools do not form: scraps, wreckage of objects, traces of the “world above.” De Luca photographed them, immersed in the turbid, gray water that blurs their outlines, covered with silt, wedged among rocks. Only a few details emerge from the milky images—the shape of a bicycle wheel, the color of a piece of fabric surfacing from the water. The rest merges into a monochrome, dreamlike-mnemonic, archaeological vision. The river’s slime covers everything, preserves everything, stratifies and removes. The Tiber is the memory of everyday life in Rome. Its riverbed, the sediments that compose it, preserve and conceal traces of remote eras: coins, fragments of amphorae, oil lamps, building materials. Remains of hulls, anchors, weapons from various periods, even scraps of uniforms belonging to retreating fighters of the Roman Republic of 1848, such as those recently uncovered by the buckets of a dredger. It is minor, non-heroic history whose traces the river has preserved over the centuries. What will the artifacts of our time—those that Iginio De Luca photographed before they disappeared into the murky waters of the Tiber, swallowed by its currents—say about us? It is to our reflection, more than to that of future generations, that the artist offers them, making them the protagonists of his latest body of work. The photographic images, taken in 2021, were first used—enlarged to billboard size—for a series of disorienting street posters in the streets of post-Covid Rome. The language of advertising is often used by De Luca to draw attention to themes and things that usually go unnoticed. In his urban actions, the “blitzes”—provocative, unauthorized incursions into public space that in his artistic practice accompany photography, video, and installation—the pop tone and tools of commercial communication are employed with the aim of ethical and political denunciation. In Venice as well, the first image of the exhibition, placed outside the gallery over the water of a reflecting canal, is mounted like a sign on a lightbox that gives the photograph an extraordinary presence. The light of the device pulses, transmitting—through Morse code—the title of the exhibition: Lo gran mar dell’essere, a line by Dante from Canto I of the Paradiso. Inside, the other images of the wreckage photographed in Rome, mounted on aluminum, are cantilevered from walls covered with poster paper reproducing, out of scale, details of the floor of the Venetian lagoon. One of the scraps, a corroded, twisted, rusted metal plate rescued from the water, is placed on the floor of a smaller, empty room. A mechanism makes it vibrate, again according to Morse code, transmitting the Venetian tide bulletin. The sound it emits is mysterious and unsettling; it seems to come from the depths, from a submerged wreck, and spreads throughout the space. River and lagoon, in these works by Iginio De Luca, exist in an “osmotic tension”: each refers to the other and vice versa, in a continuous process of immersion and emergence that is both physical and symbolic. Both bodies of water—heavily shaped by human activity, polluted, muddy—evoke unsettling feelings precisely because they have been domesticated. Beneath their turbid surface one senses the presence of a submerged, metaphysical world, holding its breath—made all the more disturbing by the realization that it is part of us.

Cristiana Perrella