Photographer Susan Sanders has jumped on board our week-long celebration of the written word in Rome. Thus, on this Photo Friday, she offers us a vision of Rome as a city of words. The photograph above was taken in Summer 2007 when artist Jenny Holzer staged a series of textual projections in the Eternal City. Here, words slide across the Tiber River before creeping up its embankments and scaling the heights of Castel Sant’Angelo.
What if words were visible and tactile objects? What if we could see and feel all that is been spoken and expressed in a dense and crowded city like Rome? These questions remind us of a passage from Jeanette Winterson’s book, Sexing the Cherry, in which she describes a city in which words are more than sound-filled breaths of air that escape from our mouths:
The streets are badly lit and the distance from one side to the other no more than the span of my arms. The stone crumbles, the cobbles are uneven. The people who throng the streets shout at each other, their voices rising from the mass of heads and floating upwards towards the church spires and the great copper bells that clang the end of the day. Their words, rising up, form a thick cloud over the city, which every so often must be thoroughly cleansed of too much language. Men and women in balloons fly up from the main square and, armed with mops and scrubbing brushes, do battle with the canopy of words trapped under the sun.
The words resist erasure. The oldest and most stubborn form a thick crush of chattering rage. Cleaners have been bitten by words still quarrelling, and in one famous lawsuit a woman whose mop had been eaten and whose hand was badly mauled by a vicious row sought to bring the original antagonists to court. The men responsible made their defense on the grounds that the words no longer belonged to them. Years had passed. Was it their fault if the city had failed to deal with its overheads? The judge ruled against the plantiff but ordered the city to buy her a new mop. She was not satisfied, and was later found lining the chimneys of her accused with vitriol.
I once accompanied a cleaner in a balloon and was amazed to hear, as the sights of the city dropped away, a faint murmuring like bees. The murmuring grew louder and louder till it sounded like the clamoring of birds, then like the deafening noise of schoolchildren let out for the holidays. She pointed with her mop and I saw a vibrating mass of many colors appear before us. We could no longer speak to each other and be heard.
She aimed her mop at a particularly noisy bright red band of words who, from what I could make out, had escaped from a group of young men on their way home from a brothel. I could see from the set of my companion’s mouth that she found this particular job distasteful, but she persevered, and in a few moments all that remained was the fading pink of a few ghostly swear-words.
For more images of language made immortal by Jenny Holzer’s Rome projections, click here, here, here and here. And visit Susan Sanders’ photo blog to see more of her compelling views of Rome.
