A sonic plunge into the infrastructure of empire and collapse, first installed inside the tract of Trajan's aqueduct that passes below the cryptoporticus of the American Academy in Rome in May 2011. This piece draws upon excerpts of poetic scores by Jennifer Scappettone performed live by the Difforme Ensemble--Marco Ariano (percussion and electronics), Renato Ciunfrini (sampler, contrabass clarinet, voice) and Roberto Fega (electronics), with vocals by Jennifer Scappettone, Ersela Kripa, and Karen Yasinsky--remixed with field recordings made in Roman aqueducts (the Acqua Traiana, Acqua Marcia, and Acqua Claudia), discussions with community members about the fate of monumental waterworks, readings from outmoded chronicles of Roman history, and decodings of the inscriptions to the underworld hovering in the courtyard above. "X Locus: Cryptoporticus (Abluvion)" animates the hollows beneath our feet. Choral utterances emerge from a blighted underground: montages of voices salvaged from the community and from pastoral poetry, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Lewis Carroll's Alice, to sound the metamorphosing role of now-defunct aqueducts in feeding the city, or in spurring deviant behaviors and sieges of empire. In the May 2011 installation, environmental media projections by Stephen Mueller and Ersela Kripa (AGENCY Architecture) and a conversant soundtrack by Paul Rudy reliquefied the corridor that hosts a tract of the 1,902-year-old aqueduct, while from a hole in the floor opening onto the channel itself, Scappettone's poem drew listeners into cycles of use, abuse, and disuse of infrastructure for the public good: portents for our postpastoral moment. Thanks to the artists, scholars, and staff of the American Academy in Rome for their voices in the work: special thanks to chef Mona Talbott and the Rome Sustainable Food Project, archaeologist Gianni Ponti and colleagues at Roma Sotterranea, classicist Andrew Riggsby, and medievalist Lila Yawn.

A sound-poem on national, cultural, linguistic, and psychological crossing and dislocation, first installed at the American Academy in Rome for the collaborative installation X Locus on April 27-28, 2011. Surrounded by a virtual "moat"--a soundtrack of fountains and fowl by composer Paul Rudy, and projections by AGENCY Architecture that rendered the vaults of courtyard arcades liquid--this site-specific sound poem by Jennifer Scappettone invited community members to enter the core of the cortile to listen for the intertwinings and disintertwinings in a narrative loop. "X Locus: Cortile" reconstructs the cacophonous history and presence of this courtyard, shaped by Columbian Exposition architects McKim, Mead, & White in 1913 as a convening space for the Academy--itself a nation-building and nation-expanding project on Rome's Janiculum Hill. In this ephemeral neighborhood, or borgo, of transit defined by the Aurelian Walls of imperial Rome and a sequence of raucous gates, the designations "American" and "Italian" are both sheltered and continually recast as a looping sequence of never-quite arrived-at aspirations, disappointments, researches, and desires. Meanwhile, the rising plants and pastiched funerary inscriptions that line the courtyard remind those who dine in and pass through this space of the anxious and fructifying lives underground. Thanks to the members of the 2010-11 Academy community: chefs, architects and designers, composers, poets, classicists, medievalists, an early modernist, a Serbian linguist, a Tibetan-American singer, an English sculptor and a stone carver, Russian, Cuban, Albanian, and Italian-Dutch installation artists, a bharatnatyam dancer, a painter, a Russian bookmaker, an American and an Italian filmmaker, an Israeli-American doctor, Romanian and Italian baristas, protesters from the streets of the Italian capital, and other comrades eluding categorization, for the sought and found material of their cherished voices. Special thanks to Huck Hodge for tracts from his development of "Pools of Shadow from an Older Sky." First published on textsound here: http://textsound.org/index.php?ISSUE=12