Jenny Holzer – For the Academy

In the interest of building meaningful partnerships between different foreign academies in Rome and corporate sponsors, for programming events on Piazza Tevere, Jones invited the American Academy in Rome to host artist Jenny Holzer for a one night event at the river site. Luminous, synchronized, scrolling projections of texts by international poets and writers, in both English and Italian, were cast along the 560 meters (1800 feet) of Piazza Tevere’s right bank over the course of the evening. The ascending texts about love and war rose from below, up across the wall and onto the trees. An unexpected gift from the Tiber added to the visual spectacle as the projections were mirrored on the water, creating dramatic reflections that descended into the river. Viewers gathered on the banks, parallel walkways and bridges, to witness the glowing texts in the silence of the immense darkened space.

Light projections have been essential to Jenny Holzer’s media-spanning artistic practice for over a decade. Her Rome series of projections were presented at five sites across the City: the American Academy in Rome, the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola, Piazza Tevere (between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini), Teatro di Marcello and Castel Sant’Angelo. Holzer presented writing by Yehuda Amichai, Antonella Anedda, Paolo Bertolani, Elizabeth Bishop, Patrizia Cavalli, Henri Cole, Mahmoud Darwish, Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amelia Rosselli and Wislawa Szymborska, among others.

For the Academy was presented by the American Academy in Rome and sponsored by FLOS. It was endorsed by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali and the Comune di Roma in collaboration with Tevereterno and Fondazione Volume!