X LOCUS NARRATIVE LOOP @ SOUNDCLOUD

A conversation-poem on national, cultural, linguistic and psychological dislocation created by Jennifer Scappettone—installed in the gravelly space inside a moat of liquid loggia projections and sculpted ambient fountain/fowl for X Locus, a collaboration between Scappettone, Paul Rudy, and Stephen Mueller and Ersela Kripa (AGENCY Architecture), held at the courtyard of the American Academy in Rome on April 27-28, 2011. The sound poem is constructed of interweaving movements approaching the history and actuality of this courtyard, shaped by Columbian Exposition architects McKim, Mead, & White in 1913, lined with playfully pastiched funerary inscriptions within an Academy of national designation on the Janiculum Hill, just inside the Aurelian Walls of historical Rome, traversed below by Trajan's Aqueduct.

In this hybrid neighborhood contoured by the Wall and a sequence of raucous gates, the designations "American" and "Italian" are both housed and continually recast as a looping sequence of never quite arrived-at aspirations, disappointments, researches and desires.

Thanks to the voices of the AAR community—chefs, scholars, architects, composers, poets, baristas, a singer, a sculptor, a painter and installation artist, a filmmaker, a doctor, and various others eluding definition—for the sought and found material of their cherished voices.