At Giovanna Caruso Fendi’s FOROF, Rome’s Past Finds New Context in the Contemporary

Most people go to Rome for its ancient history, but the city offers many possible journeys through different eras, from the Roman Empire and earlier periods to the Baroque, the modern and the contemporary. When it comes to the interaction between contemporary art and the layers of the past embedded in the city’s terrain, the art space FOROF is probably the finest example—both for its founding history and its programming. It brings contemporary art into the heart of ancient Rome, creating opportunities for fertile dialogue not only between different eras and aesthetics but around themes that recur throughout the history of human civilization.

When excavations begin for a new development project in Rome, it is almost certain that ruins will be found. So it was hardly a surprise that when Alda Fendi acquired Palazzo Roccagiovine, directly in front of Trajan’s Column, the past resurfaced as soon as renovation began. The building housed a printing workshop for years, but once excavation started to transform the space into the future home of Alda Fendi Esperimenti, ancient marble flooring began to emerge. Fendi’s foundation eventually found its home elsewhere, in the Velabro neighborhood, in a complex of historic buildings restored by Jean Nouvel and now transformed into the luxury aparthotel and cultural complex Rhinocheros.

This delicate site next to Trajan’s Column was taken over by her daughter, Giovanna Caruso Fendi, who launched FOROF in the remains of what had once been an important part of the Basilica Ulpia inside Trajan’s Forum—one of the symbolic centers of Roman imperial power, designed by Apollodorus of Damascus. Its underground spaces preserve an extraordinary portion of the eastern apse with the original polychrome marble floors—”giallo antico,” “pavonazzetto” and “verde africano”—and, most importantly, the place where the manumissio took place, the public act through which enslaved people regained their freedom.

“What struck me from the beginning was not only the archaeological value of the site, but its capacity to still speak to the present,” Caruso Fendi tells Observer during a walkthrough of the space. “Descending into the foundations of the Basilica Ulpia means immersing oneself in the depths of ancient Rome, but also entering a short circuit between past, present and future.”

After the discovery, Caruso Fendi felt almost a calling to reclaim that singular place, which had remained inactive for more than 15 years. Launched in 2022 as a benefit society, FOROF was conceived as a uniquely hybrid cultural space where contemporary artists are invited into a face-to-face encounter with the city’s presence and history. Renovated by IT’S Studio, FOROF’s underground space today hosts context-specific contemporary art exhibitions featuring both newly commissioned works and recontextualized pieces in dialogue with the archaeological remains. “The ancient is not a backdrop; it is an active presence that conditions and transforms whatever encounters it,” Caruso Fendi emphasizes. “The result is a space of resonance between different temporalities—archaeological, human and geological—that overlap without canceling one another out.” Each of the space’s site-specific exhibitions lasts about nine months and is activated through a series of monthly events called Episodes: multidisciplinary performative interventions that involve and invite other artists.

By now, there are numerous case studies demonstrating how contemporary practices can reactivate, valorize and even help preserve ancient heritage. Yet despite these practices becoming increasingly widespread, and despite the biennial model having encouraged symbiotic intrusions between past and contemporary heritage, there is still considerable resistance in Italy and in Rome. Caruso Fendi attributes this to Italy’s layered, identity-tied heritage, which is often perceived as something to be frozen in time rather than activated. With FOROF, the challenge was to show that activating does not mean altering, but understanding more deeply. “It is not about imposing oneself on history, but about creating new possibilities for interpretation,” she argues. “Contemporary art has the ability to ask questions, to create temporal short circuits and to make visible again what we often stop seeing out of habit.”

Working on an archaeological site such as the Basilica Ulpia requires absolute respect but also the willingness to accept that history is never silent, she argues. Every site-specific intervention is born from a continuous dialogue with the place and its memory.

A compelling example is the current show by Alicja Kwade, “INFRASUPRA.” In it, the internationally acclaimed Polish, Berlin-based artist engages in a carefully calibrated dialogue with both the history and the essence of the space, staging a confrontation between temporal and spatial dimensions in a theatrically stratified field of archaeological, geological and cosmic time. Kwade operates sculpturally across different scales, materials and temporalities, treating the site as both matter and metaphor.

It feels like the perfect site for an artist like Kwade, who has long explored and questioned the structure of reality—the frameworks humans have built to govern, shape and attempt to contain the unruly, entropic nature of all phenomena that underpins the dissolution of everyday life in time. Constructing sculptures and installations that propose new modes of coexistence between the anthropic and the natural, Kwade reveals how architecture, engineering, mathematics, history and even our sense of time are human-centered: conceptual structures invented to contain a universe in continuous motion, shaped by the restless circulation of matter and energy, indifferent to our desire for permanence and inclined instead toward instability, decay and chance.

The main installation encapsulates the dynamic encounter between human time, archaeological time, geological time and cosmic time. Set within the archaeological area, the intervention amplifies the dramatic stratification of matter and perception. Black felt emphasizes the gaps in the original marble flooring, making these ancient fragments appear like islands floating in a dark pond, or celestial bodies suspended in the universe. The archaeological suddenly becomes something cosmic: another world, held in unusual silence, suspended between time and space. In the former atrium libertatis, where manumission once took place, The Heavy Light assumes an almost astral charge: the suspended stones read like a constellation, a galaxy or a thought given weight, held in impossible equilibrium between different forces. Kwade turns mass and gravity into both philosophical and spiritual problems in a work that seems to ask whether human history can still be understood from a human perspective alone, or whether it must be rethought within a broader cosmos in which every structure, body and civilization is only a temporary arrangement of matter. Even the shadows projected by the stones feel like ghosts—residues of the vanished systems of belief, power and labor that once passed through the site.

At the center of the show is a question of perception and time. Caruso Fendi describes it as an invitation to rethink our relationship with history and the present—and this is what she wants FOROF to be: a place where the past continues to generate the future through the vision of contemporary artists, and where heritage is not crystallized but continuously put back into circulation through new forms of experience, sensitivity and thought.

Previous seasons of FOROF programming have brought other international artists into dialogue with the dense, stratified history of the site, including irreverent Austrian collective Gelitin, Augustas Serapinas, Alex Cecchetti and Thomas Doxiadis. The project also creates new opportunities for engagement, knowledge-building and appreciation of heritage among the local community, particularly with younger audiences. This desire to educate and raise awareness is evident in the visitor path itself, which invites people to delve into the site’s history before encountering the contemporary work.

From the outset, Caruso Fendi imagined FOROF as a place to be experienced, not simply visited. “I was interested in creating a space for gathering, exchange and active participation, inspired by the spirit of the historic cafés of the 20th-century avant-gardes, from Cabaret Voltaire to Giacomo Balla’s Bal Tic Tac, and the postwar Roman Art Club,” she says. “These were places where artists, intellectuals and the public shared ideas, experiences and visions. For this reason, FOROF’s public is never merely a spectator.”

FOROF was also conceived not as a private foundation but as a project structured through a relatively new legal form available in Italy for cultural organizations, the SRL Società Benefit. For Caruso Fendi, this choice reflects the desire to generate positive social impact and shared value through cultural activity: “I chose to reinvest all revenue produced back into the artistic and cultural project, so that FOROF can continue to be an accessible place, open to dialogue and capable of creating lasting connections with the territory and the community.” This legal and business structure also makes the audience a stakeholder, encouraging new forms of micro-patronage and fundraising built around community participation.

The public response, Caruso Fendi says, has been remarkable. A cross-sectional community has formed around FOROF, made up of residents, scholars, tourists, occasional visitors and young people looking for new experiences. “This shift is perhaps the most significant result: the passage from visit to relationship. I want FOROF to have an impact above all on the way people see. To free, through art and culture, the gaze of those who enter here: this is perhaps the most important goal. To teach people to observe heritage not as something distant or immobile, but as living matter, still capable of speaking to the present.”

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