ABSTRACT
The South African artist William Kentridge is invited by the cultural association Tevereterno to work on the theme of history and memory of the city. The artist gives Rome a street artwork, choosing a place full of life and symbolism: the Tiber River. He represents on a stretch of the embankment of the riverfront, bordered by Ponte Sisto on one side and Ponte Mazzini on the other, a procession of figures, calling them Triumphs and Laments. It is an occasion to pay homage to the history of a city that he considers the maximum representation of the history of the West. Based on a sequence of silhouettes reconstructed according to a complex atlas of iconographic sources, the frieze speaks to us of memory and leads us to retrace a journey made up of leaps in time. This text proposes to partially analyze the meaning of this work through an analytical approach that attempts to reconstruct Kentridge’s complex and stratified vision of time and history. But it will also be an opportunity to reflect on broader issues such as the importance of art for the preservation of memory and urban space as an opportunity to reflect on the great concepts related to time.
